[About a year ago] I was in a twitterscussion with @greywolf about twitterblacklist.com [now closed] reminded me of the oft-rehashed discussions about Real-Time Blackhole lists for email. People are making the same arguments almost verbatim about emerging anti-Twitter-spam tools now. I think, though, that the frothing indignation about the problem these tools are causing a relatively few legitimate users likely stems from a widely-shared ignorance of the emerging spam storm that’s coming on Twitter.

Many Twitter users think it is mostly immune to serious spam. They’ll frequently say things like greywolf said: “twitter has the easiest self regulating mechanism you think someone is spam stop following”.

But it’s not nearly that simple, nor is Twitter safe.

One reason is that keyword-tracking (“track oranges” and you’ll see tweets that include the word ‘oranges’ in them, even from users you don’t follow), hashtags, and tag channels (these last two closely linked), three very useful tools for Twitter-savvy users, are extremely susceptible to spam abuse.

The spam slime include keywords and hashtags to get their spam links (usually with a deceptive description) to show up in the twitstream of all the users following those terms. Since those users are tracking words, not the spammer, the fact that they aren’t following the spammer’s id is irrelevant; the spam still gets delivered.

Since Twitter has essentially no tools (more on this in a moment) to combat this, the only way to protect yourself is to not use keyword-tracking at all, which sort of throws the baby out with the bathwater. Thus, this spam is parasitic on its host (keyword tracking), and very difficult to extract without killing the host.

At least one spammer uses the term ‘Destin’ and sends out multiple links daily under automated usernames (vick33728d or the like) purporting to offer a headline about beach news and a headline to a local beach newspaper. Each of these links forwarded (last I checked) to some “learn at home” scam site. Pretty normal stuff. But they’re obviously just testing the waters: there were several a day for a week or so, then it went quiet again. As much as I respect the Twitter team’s work, I don’t think it’s because they found a way to keep spammers from signing up.

You see this same pattern from email spammers. They try out new modes of eluding spam filters in small numbers at first, and once they find something effective, then cometh the deluge.

The insidious spammer has another attack vector. Since twitter accounts are free and easy to create, the spammer can create as many as he likes. Then with each account he can follow 20,000, or 40,000, or however many user ids he can identify, using an automated tool. The cost to the spammer of doing this approaches zero.

Twitter made this harder by placing limits on the rate at which you can follow people, and placing some flags on the ratio of followed to followers. Still, this only means the spammer has to create more Twitter accounts, not that the practice will change. And just as spammers using temporary email accounts for sending, it matters not at all if the account is blocked or deleted within hours. There are no practical limits on the creation of these. They’re an inexhaustable supply.

But how does it work for the spammer? Well, when one user follows another, the second user receives an email notice that someone has followed them. That provides two possible benefit paths for the spammer, and 2 costs for the victim.

The first benefit path for the spammer is that the victim will just follow anyone who follows them, “until they have some reason not to”. Many people, especially new Twitter users, are so glad to have a follower that they’ll just click the link and follow them back. (Note that phishing attacks are coming, too, though I haven’t yet seen any here). Once the victim has followed the spammer, the spammer gets at least one free shot where their spam tweets will be seen by the victim before being un-followed. More likely, they’ll get several before the user manages to find the time to block them (or figures out how, because Twitter doesn’t make it real obvious for n00bs how this is done).

The second benefit path for the spammer is that the victim, seeing the “follow” notice, will at the very least visit the spammer’s Twitter page, and with any luck, click on the spammer’s web link. Voila! A visit to a web trap, there to do whatever it is spammers always do when they can lure a visitor onto one of their landing pages.

In each individual case, the victim will un-follow the spammer, limiting the amount of spam that can be inflicted. But in the aggregate – among all Twitter users – this is not a negligible effect. The fact that it might not cost me very much doesn’t mean that the total cost of it isn’t large. It’s essentially without bound, because the cost to do it is roughly zero.

The problem that concerns me more is that each follow by a spammer creates a small, but non-zero, burden of action on the recipient.

If a spammer creates an account and follows 20,000 users, each of those 20,000 users will receive an email message, and will have to stop for a moment and make a decision: visit the link, ignore the follow, follow blindly, etc. Even if they just delete the email, they have to take action.

This isn’t a big deal if one or two spammers do it; but just like with email spam, it doesn’t scale. People used to make the same argument about email spam: “Oh, spam’s not a big deal, quit fussing about it. If you get a message and you don’t want it, just hit the delete button.”

But most people have learned, too late and to their chagrin, that this only works when the spammer cloud is nascent. When an infinite number of people can at zero cost send me an infinite number of such messages, I don’t have time to hit the delete button that many times.

The cognitive burden placed on the aggregate group of users or victims grows larger and larger, which is the inherent threat of the spam problem. If spam growth were contained where it could grow no faster than linearly with the number of spammers, it would not be such an issue.

The reason spam is such a terrible problem is that the power of automation lies almost entirely on the side of the offenders, not the victims. Gmail and other email spam systems have helped to reverse that with hybrid systems that include content filtering, which is the most accurate way.

But for instant messaging-based systems like Twitter, there is no point in the system at which it is cost-effective or time-effective to inject content filtering prior to the user seeing it.

Thus the architecture of Twitter itself (and any similar system), lends itself to abuse by making it difficult to produce automated tools that could tip the balance of power back in favor of the victims.

This is exacerbated by the fact that many Twitter users don’t yet see this problem emerging. This may be because most people have no in-depth knowledge of spam fighting, and don’t recognize the parameters and characteristics of the problem. It’s somewhat analogous to a beginning programmer who doesn’t know anything about big-O notation complaining that other people keep writing confusing code, and why don’t they just bubble-sort everything.

When people lack the tools or the knowledge or the experience to estimate the danger of the emerging spam threat on Twitter, they will react badly — sometimes overlaying an inappropriate ideological model on the problem — to the emergence of the first crude tools and attempts to deal with the problem by those who do recognize it.

Not to become too political, but it’s also analogous to the way people who don’t believe “terrorism” is a legitimate threat react to governmental measures intended catch terrorists. To be fair, if you don’t believe terrorists are really after you, then certainly measures that inconvenience or threaten your ideals are half-assed at best, and openly dangerous at worst. So your perception of the problem affects your perceptions of potential solutions.

All that being said, just as with real-time black hole lists and other anti-spam mechanisms (like the odious “fill-out-this-form-I’m-blocking-unknown-email-addresses”), there are good and bad solutions. Good solutions, like greylisting, do some good without imposing an undue burden on legitimate users. They are effective while limiting collateral damage. Other “solutions” more or less indiscriminately destroy everything in sight that matches some limited set of criteria.

Real time black hole lists that lack a timely and usable mechanism to get an address removed are part of the spam problem and for the same reason: the ability to automate damage-dealing outstrips the ability of humans to manually undo it.

If http://twitterblacklist.com does not provide a mechanism either to periodically refresh its listing (if it’s done automatically), or if its only criteria is one that does not correspond strongly to spamming (solely a follower/following ratio), then it is itself part of the problem and I think I would share part of greywolf’s frustration. Likewise if there is no easy way for a user to notify them and say, “I’m a real human, check my content, remove me from this list,” then it’s a bad attempt at a good service.

Unfortunately, bad tools don’t usually help, and the process of figuring out which are bad and good can be long and painful. On the spam front, Twitter’s got a lot of nasty work ahead.

I’d like to do some pair programming. The problem is, you can’t exactly do that by yourself. At least, not if you’re reasonably healthy of mind, as I understand it.

I’m looking for someone willing to let me come to your place and “pair up” with you for at least a day. I can’t promise how useful I’ll be, but I’m a reasonably pleasant guy, I bathe every month whether I need it or not, and I’ll buy you lunch.

My only requirements are:

1. Gotta be within an hour or so of Huntsville, Alabama. I need to be able to drive there and back on the same day. That basically means anywhere from Nashville, TN to Birmingham, AL, and from Florence, AL to maybe Scottsboro, AL.
2. Gotta be Ruby. Rails is even better, but I’d go hang out with a pure Ruby hacker. This isn’t because other languages and contexts sux0r. It’s just that Ruby (and Rails) is what I’m doing right now, and where I’m hoping to ramp up my level of mastery quickly.
3. You have to have done Pair Programming before, and can show me at least your way that works best. How do we set up our work space? Do we use two computers, linked up? One? Where do we sit? I don’t want to spend the day figuring it out with another Pair noob.

That’s it. I have a few preferences, but they’re not essential: I’d like to work with someone who does BDD/TDD so I can see it in action. I’d strongly prefer if whatever project we worked on was git-based (even better if it’s on github) for the same reason: I’d like to see how real work gets done in this mode. But honestly, any experienced Pair Programmer doing Ruby that will have me will work fine.

I don’t want money or credit or co-copyright or anything. I don’t care what the project you’re working on is. Anything is fine. I just want to learn, and hopefully contribute a little. If it works out, I’d like to do it some more, though no one should feel the slightest compunction against telling me, “Get lost, you bum!” after the first day.

I was inspired by Corey Haines’ Pair Programming Tour 2008. While I can’t travel around the country pairing up with awesome programmers, I’m free to travel around a little bit, and I know there are some good Ruby+Rails folks not too far away.

I’ve been programming more or less steadily for almost 30 years. I’ve been working with Rails for over 3 years, but only for private projects (one large one for one of my companies). In my career I’ve worked in a lot of different platforms, quite a few languages, and at various levels of OS, from a tiny bit of device drivers all the way out to user interfaces. I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things.

But the discipline of writing software moves very fast, and I’ve not been as deeply involved in programming as I’d like in the past few years, and frankly, there’s a lot of cool stuff I feel like I’ve missed. And one of those is the emergence of pair programming, and the BDD/TDD paradigm.

So…anyone willing to take me in and show me the ropes? Email me at rew@erebor.com, find me on Twitter, or call or text me at 256-777-7650.

Back already? OK, good.

The guide is very thorough, and I love the idea. It’s just so refreshing to think of “let’s create an entire Ubuntu machine just to temporarily mount a drive long enough to rsync to it, then we’ll get rid of it.” And what’s more, you can automate the whole process via a shell script. It’s a great example of how things change with easily-accessible virtualization.

So I like the FreeWisdom piece, but here are a couple of changes there were helpful for me.

First, when I ran the script from anywhere other than the directory where the id_rsa-gsg-keypair live (~/ec2/ or wherever you have it), ssh couldn’t find it. And if I specified the path as -i ~/ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair, then the ssh command passed to rsync failed (I presume because the shell environment under which rsync runs it doesn’t have ‘~/’ setup; I once knew off-hand which part of the shell startup did this, but I’ve flushed it to disk somewhere). You could pass the full path name of your id_rsa-gsg-keypair, but I prefer to just cd there to start with. Keep in mind this means that the output of the rsync command, redirected to ‘out.txt’ in the script, will actually go in this same directory. If that’s not what you want, redirect the output of rsync with a more suitable filename.

The second thing I did was a little more complicated. I have StrictHostKeyChecking turned on, which means that every time I run this against a new instance, ssh asks whether to accept the remote hosts keys as valid. This means I can’t schedule this script to run unattended.

ssh allows some configuration options to be set on the command line. So I’ve added two ssh options to get around this problem.

The first option only has to be added on the first call to ssh. By passing -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” to the first ssh call, I tell it to automatically accept the remote host key, adding it to the known_hosts file without asking.

This gets rid of the prompting problem, but introduces another: each time this script is run, it’s going to drop another IP/key pair into our known_hosts file, and eventually that will have to be cleaned up. Besides, we only want to accept the key during the time that it’s our instance.

So I add this second option to every ssh call in the script. First, get a reasonably likely unique temporary name (yes, I know there are more rigorous ways to do this; feel free to expand as you have time and interest):

KNOWN_HOSTS=”/tmp/known_hosts.$$”

Then tell ssh to use this temporary file to store the key file from the temporary instance by using the -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” option.

So the initial ssh call in the FreeWisdom script (line 16 or thereabouts in the original) becomes:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “mkdir /mnt/samba && mount /dev/sdh /mnt/samba”

Once we’ve connected to the instance once with StrictHostKeyChecking turned off, its key will be in our temporary known_hosts file. Thus, we don’t need the -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” option in any future ssh commands.

The rsync command then becomes:

rsync -e “ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o ‘UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS’” -avz /Users/rew/Documents root@$EC2_HOST:/mnt/samba/ > out.txt

And the ssh command to umount the volume:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “umount /mnt/samba”

Remove the temporary known_hosts file at the end:

rm $KNOWN_HOSTS

and it’s all cleaned up.

Give it a try, and let me know of any clever extensions you make.

This is, after all, how it’s usually done in cellular-land. But Apple had gotten a lot of press for their “game-changing” deal with AT&T (and AT&T had gotten a lot of criticism). So did AT&T suddenly gain the upper hand? Did they outsmart El Jobso? Did Apple stumble here?

Hardly.

According to this Marketwatch piece, the iPhone 3G subsidies are expected to cost AT&T around $1 billion this year.

The new entry price point for the 3G iPhone – $199 – is killer, and is going to move a lot of the devices to customers who’d been unable or unwilling to part with $399 or higher before. And a lot of that difference is coming out of AT&T’s pockets. AT&T, for their part, has a plan here; cellular companies have this game worked out pretty well, having subsidized cell phones nearly since their introduction in order to lock-in long-term revenue.

But back to the original question: was Apple willing to give up their monthly cut of all those locked-in customers just to move more hardware? Did they give up on trying to carve out a recurring revenue stream from their ground-breaking phone?

No, they just moved on to the next phase of their plan.

The key is the App Store. Apple has created a new market for software applications – the iPhone – and has made itself the single retail outlet for selling software into that environment. There are some exceptions – you can deploy apps within your own organization, or to a hundred or so iPhones ‘ad hoc’ – but for pretty much everyone else, if you develop an iPhone app, you’re going to sell it through Apple’s App Store or not at all. And there are going to be a lot of iPhone apps sold.

Steve Jobs spent twice as long during his keynote talking about the App Store, and applications available for the iPhone, as about the new iPhone itself. Including the enterprise elements and the SDK, it was almost 4 times as long. Clearly, this is a big deal to Apple.

Having unleashed the iPhone as a target platform for 3rd-party developers, and then set themselves up to take a cut of every application sold for it, Apple wants as many iPhones in the field as possible. So they’re letting AT&T keep all the monthly revenue in exchange for subsidizing the rollout of the new iPhones to millions of new subscribers (I predict they easily beat their 10-million-iPhone target for 2008), all of whom will be hungry for new apps for their new toys.

And Apple stands to profit from every single one.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be,” indeed.

Update:Reuters reports that “some estimates” put the impact of the lost monthly revenue from AT&T at 3c/share.

But Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster projects hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Apple Store, which would dwarf the lost revenue from AT&T, even by his “conservative” estimates.

I saw this on a mailing list recently (paraphrased to protect the worried):

I like gmail too, but lately they’re starting to scare me lately. The amount of information they collect and how they use it is startling.

I e-mailed a friend talking about some symptoms of a medical condition, and Gmail served up a sponsored ad offering a diagnosis and selling a solution for the condition.

So this puzzles me a little.

First, GMail has done this since day 1. And people have been worried about this since before it launched.

But why is this so troubling to people? This recent email was just one example; I read lots of people who seem bothered by this. It’s often occasioned by an ad that seemed to “know” about a recent email conversation the user had.

I don’t know what nefarious things Google may be doing with my Gmail behind my back; I can’t say that they’re not doing something wrong.

But all they’re doing with the ads is keyword-matching, just like they do with Adsense on a web page.

Companies “bid” on words and phrases, and when those show up in a context where Google serves ads, by some magic algorithm (Google for “how does adsense select ads”) Google serves up matching ads from its pool of bidders.

If an ad appears on your Gmail page, it’s not because Google is matching your *identity* and then notifying some other company that “Hey, Ryan was talking to Joe about spontaneously erupting super-vision-itis” so they can jump in and prepare an ad for you personally, cackling maniacally. It’s because the magic matching key-phrase is somewhere in that web page, and that ad was automatically chosen from the pool of available ones that matched *some* text in your current page.

Keep in mind that the page loaded by Gmail is huge; there’s a lot more text transferred to your browser than what you see on your screen at any given moment.

Gmail pre-fetches a lot of stuff to make the Javascript-based navigation smoother and faster. So just because you don’t see anything about that message you just sent on your screen doesn’t mean
that message is not in the window.

Now, for all I know, Google may be wiretapping our cell phones and selling the content to the North Koreans to kill puppies with. But highly relevant contextual ads on Gmail don’t seem to me very strong evidence of anything alarming.

Or maybe I’m just insufficiently paranoid.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.

I just wanted answer Miro’s question. So I googled ‘Miro Slodki’ and found his blog. “A-ha!” I thought. “I’ll just zip over and email him directly, and in less time than it would take to fill out FC’s ‘new user’ form. Take that, Fast Company!”

Only…I couldn’t find an email link. Now stubbornly in pursuit of my prey, I spent 5 minutes wandering around the site, even visiting his LinkedIn profile, only to by stymied. Nowhere on the site (that I could find) was there any way to just contact Miro directly (even via a web form), other than posting comments on actual posts.

I even found that Miro is looking for interesting work:

PS. At the moment I find myself seeking new challenges and contracting assignments. I would appreciate if you could extend a kind word on my behalf and send the referrals my way.

But how could I do that if I can’t find how to contact him?

I searched for a while, but Google and I couldn’t find him. I found other places that Miro had joined and commented, all of which jealously guarded any way to contact him directly. So eventually I gave up. We’ll see if, in an amusing irony, the linkback to his blog that Wordpress will auto-generate will draw him here to see the link he’d asked for a week or so ago.

Hey, I’m not picking on Miro, by any means. I don’t even know him (though I know him better than I did 20 minutes ago, that’s for sure). I’m just pointing out what I think are two serious problems companies and people share when trying to use the web to achieve their goals:

• Trying to enforce behavior on people that I have no relationship with, and to whom I offer no benefit. I wasn’t trying to get something from Fast Company; I was trying to help out one of their readers, on their site, by linking to one of their articles.
• Seeking visibility and opportunity without giving it a way to knock. I know spam is a problem, but being permanently incommunicado is worse. You don’t have to go as far as Scoble. But if you want contact, you have to throw me a bone.

“Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.” – Michael Covington (slide 8, “The unselfish perspective”)

It seems the collective heart of the social media crowd has been stolen away by video blogging, which appears to them more or less The Ultimate Tool. I can see why some might think that. But I hate it, and you should, too.

With some great bloggers, like Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge and Marc Andreesson and even Mark Cuban (who’s a great blogger w/o being a particularly good writer), I know what they do. Their ability to blog intensely interesting pieces is just part of the unfair measure of talent they’ve been given in a field other than their primary one.

But there are lots of people making lots of social media noise whose actual profession I cannot figure out. I enjoy reading Chris Brogan, Andrew Chen, Kevin Lim, etc. – I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they get paid to do, and by whom. (OK, I think Kevin’s a grad student, but the others – no idea).

And they’re the tip of the iceberg. There’s apparently a semi-closed system of maybe a hundred or more of nearly-A-level social media butterflies out there blogging and twitting and flickring and who-knows-what-else-ing each other, all while getting more and more excited about the “possibilities”. But possibilities for what?

My impression is that right now it’s sort of a blogorrheic derby, to see who can output the fastest, most nearly stream-of-consciousness flow of stuff, to “make people think” and “examine the issues in social media”. Right. Make noise, get attention. I have a 3-year-old. Some of this is not unfamiliar to me.

That brings us to video blogging. When someone sits down to write a blog, unless they’re just compulsive, they have to at least be aware of the idea of editing or re-reading before posting. They may not do it much, but at least the idea’s there. Most people, even in the blogosphere, still seem to at least recognize the notion that ‘better’ writing is something different than ‘first draft’ writing.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with video blogging, where immediacy seems to be one of the Primary Virtues, and where editing, even cutting out sections altogether, is verboten.

Most video is like bad writing: lazy, self-indulgent, flabby, poorly arranged, flaccid and pointless. Bad writing used to be much easier to make than bad video. But suddenly it’s vastly easier to produce video than to write. After all, you only have to manage to get the button pushed to make video; you don’t even have to type words. But good video production is much harder than it looks. It’s tempting to confuse visual quality with content quality.

When I’m reading a great post, I don’t have to read through 47 lines of “um…um…um…um…” that were auto-generated while the author was gathering his thoughts. But when I’m watching (heaven help me) a video, all those stay in. Each little 3-second pause, or 2-second nervous laugh, or irrelevant aside that seemed funny at the time, but, well, you had to be there, is left in, and then you and I and every other poor sap trying to extract value from it has to sit through them.

Look, it’s no accident that Scoble, the human content cataract, has moved so eagerly from written blogging (which at least allowed him the *opportunity* to gather and edit his thoughts before publishing) to twitter/pownce (which actively discourages either gathering OR editing of thoughts) to audio (which lets you just conveniently babble) to video (which is just audio with more let’s-face-it-do-we-really-need-to-see-that video of the mugs of the babblers).

Just click, chatter for a while, and upload! Woot! I’m adding content, I’m creating value, I’m re-conceptualizing our paradigms! Except I’m not. What I’m doing is blowing out 20 minute chunks of crap with an occasional nugget of goodness buried inside. Then I’m asking thousands or millions of people who want the nuggets to go spend 20 minutes each to find it, rather than doing the work once, digging out the nuggets, cutting out the extraneous and self-indulgent stuff, properly framing the remaining pieces so that the nuggets are presented in a reasonably fair way, and saving (18 minutes) X (however many viewers) = a lot of time.

It gets worse with every shiny new VC-backed way for people to put up endless video streams of the minutiae of their lives. Think about this: how many live-action 24×7 streams of video can you watch? The answer is 1. Only one. And you can only do that by expending an exactly equivalent stretch of your own life.

And here we come to the fatal flaw of web video (and audio; let’s not forget audio, though it seems to be passing away as passe so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning): you can’t scan or compress it very much.

Now, you have to understand, I read fast. Not as in “fast for a trained speed reader”, but much faster than an average reader. That includes many of you who think that you’re fast readers, but are really only high-functioning average ones. But while I read pretty fast, I scan like a demon. If it’s in text that I don’t need to absorb in detail, I can move through it at a scorching pace, and generally catch and either slow down and “zoom in” on, or revisit later, most of the important stuff. And it makes yummy things like Google Reader a veritable buffet of information and knowledge and (mostly) reading pleasure.

But what happens when I see a blog entry in Google Reader that consists of “Hey, this is great, watch this” and an embedded video (or worse, a link to a video)? What are my choices? For many of the various sucky video services on the web, it’s not even readily apparent how long this piece of crap is going to be before I start.

Apparently, it’s the purpose in life of a lot of the chuckleheads who write these players to keep you from skipping even one second of the Blessed Incarnation of Video that is this particular video. These brain-dead Flash-based players that can’t even do basic things like FF and REW usably. Pausing, while iffy, at least works more than not. But fast-forwarding or skipping to specific points in the video? Right. So it’s either press play and stare for however long it drags on and hope that somewhere in there is a payoff, or skip it.

So most of the time, I skip video posts to written blogs, and ignore “vblogs” entirely. And the more people post video instead of taking the time to write the #*&$#*&% essay so I can read it (quickly) or scan it (ridiculously quickly) and get what I need, the more I ignore them.

What’s needed is for people to compress and edit and excise and eliminate and then post it. Just like with your blog. Don’t make me watch what wasn’t useful. Only show me what was good. Cut it down to size. Then re-arrange it so it’s better organized. Then cut it down some more.

Do the hard work once, at your end, on behalf of every consumer of it. Don’t make your many viewers each duplicate the work or spend the time that you should have invested once for everybody. Don’t think that because you’re slamming out hours of video and audio that you’re adding any value to the world or the lives of those trying to pan through your stream of nonsense for the elusive golden nugget.

I may be in the minority. I suspect that I am, at least amongst a populace with a demonstrated affinity for “less reading, more video”. But I’m guessing that my view is more common among influencers or any people whose time is more valuable than pretty much any other commodity (note: I’m not claiming here to be an influencer, only that I suspect that we share this view of reading vs. video).

And that’s the thing video abuses: my time, and yours.

There are so many little, tiny design choices that are just sooo correct, and that I wouldn’t have known I wanted until I saw them, that it’s just amazing.

Now, I’m not about to give up my MacBook Pro for the little guy. I love screen real estate (lots of it) and while the MBA keyboard is spifftacular, it’s not the perfect laptop keyboard that the MBP’s is. Still, it was an incredible piece of hardware, and I want one. Or two. It’s much more impressive in person than in any ads for it, which is saying a lot. If you haven’t touched one, held one, then you don’t really know what the thing is like.

This morning I read Wil Shipley’s first impressions. They’re very Shipley-esque (read: funny and interesting), but the first one was exactly the feeling that I got when I saw it up close:

It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

He also says this, which is not really MBA-specific, but certainly a problem I’ve love to see solved:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I’d be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the “I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side” market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

To that I’d like to add a hearty “Amen!”

My immediate thought is that this is a perfect task for adding intelligence on the client side. For instance, I would love to have more options in Twitterific for controlling the incoming tweetstream.

With a ‘pause’ feature, if @InterestingDude is temporary at ReallyBoringConfFest07, and will be until Thursday, I’d love to be able to put him on “pause” until then, so that I don’t see all his excited tweets about impromptu hallway meetings with ReallyBoringPeople and ReallyBoringProjects.

But I don’t want to quit following @InterestingDude permanently; I’ve just lost interest for the next few days. I don’t want to have to remember to re-follow him, either; I just want to skip the next couple of days (or hours or whatever) of tweets from him.

The problem Chris and Clarence are examining is how to get more of the info that’s interesting and less of what’s not, when the “interestingness” isn’t always determined by the person or the topic. The ability to follow tweets or blog posts by “interesting people” is a start, but only a very primitive one. There are lots of fascinating people doing fascinating work, but who have hobbies that bore me to tears (and vice versa). There are a very few people who write so well that it hardly matters what they’re doing, I just enjoy reading their writing. And there are many, many people who normally would not be of interest to me at all, except when they happen to have seen/talked to/read/bought/tripped over the very piece of information which is extremely relevant to something I’m working on or discussing with other people.

Perhaps I should just quote Chris and Clarence a bit:

The problem arises when the people you follow are initiating and participating in conversations that you do not find interesting at all. [...] Said another way: I might like YOU, but not be into every little thing you are into. [...] How can we catch your tweets about social computing but skip the tweets about being stuck at JFK for a 3 hour delay?

It’s not that YOU should have to twitter differently, but rather, we should have a way to adjust the lens on what comes through our “interestingness” gate. And of course, this is all relative to whatever you’re interested in, who, and often times where. For instance, if we’re visiting Seattle, we might want to get MORE about the area around us than less, in case something newsworthy is happening (like avoiding a traffic jam).

They also (briefly) consider the personal/social implications of such filtering:

How do we on/off the conversational flow of people in such a way that we receive more of what’s interesting to us (again, very relative), without it signifying anything negative about a person?

This I don’t find as compelling, partly (perhaps) because so far I only have an extremely limited scope of friends (in anything resembling the traditional sense) who are Twittr/Whatevr users. But I feel pretty confident that the notion of any social implications of being filtered or un-followed (is that a word?) will adjust with the tools. As people spend enough time swimming in the flow of social network infostreams, it will become more apparent that social standing with a person is largely disconnected from how much of your socnet output they’re consuming at any given time (perhaps it will always have more to do with which parts of our output they consume than how much).

C&C continue:

Why can’t we have a system that’s partly like Flickr’s “interesting” and “favorites” system, that helps train Twitter (and other networks) to predict which conversations will matter to us? Something more than keywords. How do we apply this same thinking to the people we currently “follow?” What if Clarence loves when Chris talks about data centers, but doesn’t care about Chris’s current trip to New York City? How could we “gate-on” based on information, and then “gate-off” when the interestingness vanishes? [...] How could we build tools that turn on and off our view of someone’s Twitter stream based on things like: location, context, content?

This is where I think there’s a big ol’ gaping opportunity for an interesting next-gen aggregator. How many different ways are there to arrange the panes in a blog reader? Well, OK, there’s a zillion, but the point is, how many of them are enough better to compel me to change to them? Just like with the mail client, the things that really are going to motivate people to change en masse will be the addition of “intelligence” to make managing the burgeoning information therein easier.

The “pause” thing would be cool; but man, a client that could determine what I was interested in at the moment, and help me find “more of this and less of that”, would really pique my interest. Whether it did it by reacting to explicit actions like tagging or even rating (3 stars or 4?) tweets or people, or by implicit observation of my behavior (in the same vein as how Google Reader’s “Select by Auto” works), it would be a great step in the right direction.

Plus, you know, a pony. And an aeroplane. And a perpetual motion machine. I mean, it can’t hurt to ask, right?