This borders on the irresponsible. There you have TinyURL, prominent and mostly in caps, with that tiny little "rival" next to it. This story has nothing to do with TinyURL, but they're the one associated with the hack by the casual reader.
The story is this... Cli.gs ("Cligs") was hacked. There was a flaw in their editing function, which has now been turned off.
Now, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would entertain a thought within the confines of my tinfoil hat that this is mighty convenient for Cligs. I mean, here you have a negative headline that doesn't mention your business in any way, but tends to tar your chief rival. And the story itself generates extraordinary interest in a service that practically no one has heard of before. Hmmm. But I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Robert Heinlein admonishes us not to attribute conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity, and I hold to that.
Cligs looks interesting. Small URLs, but with personal analytics, intended for use with Twitter. Let's hope they fix the security, so we can take a closer look.
This is one of those posts where I really don't want to be mean, but I have to be.
Often the computer systems that we create today don't hold a candle to the things that were envisioned for computers at the very outset. For instance, I'm still in awe of what Douglas Englebart was able to accomplish back in the 1960s. (I've written at length about that in "Why you need VIC CRM".) On the other hand, not all of it was golden, even when it sounds really good on paper.
For instance, take PROJECT XANADU, billed as "the original hypertext project", established in 1960 (which makes this the longest running mostly vaporware project in the history of computers -- and I'll expound on that word "mostly" in due time). I could spend a lot of time telling you about it, or I let its author and architect, Ted Nelson, do it for me:
Mighty big words. And 40 years of effort! When the Israelites gave up 40 years of their lives, the Lord gave them the Promised Land in return. We should expect Big Things of this project. Indeed, Big Things are promised:
"Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
But when we dig through the many, many deep layers of pretention, we learn that Xanadu is basically hypertext and embedding, with micropayments thrown in, ensuring that it will never, ever be used on a large scale.
Nelson is apparently upset that ancient versions of programs don't treat documents the way his vision dictates and that hypertexting doesn't work as his vision dictates and basically that the world of computing doesn't work the way he wants it to. He's got a forty-year old dream which he's been too busy pursuing to use, as the rest of us do daily.
Nelson's vision was revolutionary, 40 years ago. His core complaints with today's computing boil down to obsolete observations. For example, Microsoft Word actually does allow marginal notes. And links. And embedding. Maybe Ted Nelson needs a newer copy. Fortunately, OpenOffice.org does all of the above, and it's free. The world actually works much better than his vaporware vision. Watch the video. Download XanaduSpace 1.0, and don't say I didn't warn you.
Broken Rules
Nelson has a list of 17 rules for documents. (These are also listed in the Xanadu FAQ) XanaduSpace proceeds to break many of them. I'll leave it to you to follow the link and read them. Here are some comments.
Rules 1 through 3 are tough to evaluate with version "1.0" of XanaduSpace, since none of the documents reference anything outside of local machine. Rule 3 in particular is highly unlikely.
Rule 4 can't be accomplished at all within XanaduSpace, as no editing facility is provided. Instead you must create your documents with a plaintext editor. So much for any criticism about systems that treat documents as paper. Xanadu documents are in fact exactly that... flat text documents. A separate document ("_Connections.txt") contains references. XanaduSpace is a viewer to resolve those references. Well... "resolve" is a pretty strong word. It colors them. Pretty, but most assuredly not the revolution that's advertised.
Rule 5 isn't demonstrated in XanaduSpace 1.0. All of the documents are plaintext.
Rule 6 is about "transclusions". Now, transclusions are basically quotes. Well... embedded quotes that replace existing text. For instance, I "transcluded" a quote from the Xanadu homepage earlier in this document, though Nelson would likely disagree in that I did it manually. Nevertheless, the effect is identical: I can see the quote; I can follow the link back to the source. Xanadu's "transclusion confusion" is of no benefit other than to obscure what the thing is by replacing the perfectly serviceable word, quote. What would be nice is to be able to reference another file and show the text inline... but you can do that in HTML documents as well by using JavaScript or server-side includes (what Xanadu calls "clinks"). And while it would be very nice to have a simple tag that embeds selected text from another document, that's not what XanaduSpace does, exactly. Really, install it and go look at the source docs in C:\Program Files\XanaduSpace\texts\demo. What you have there is conventional in-line quoting with a separate file called "_Connections.txt" that lists the attributions, which are displayed as colored filmy structures. Transclusions include the entire quoted text from the source doc and text of the destination to be replaced. If the link is broken (i.e. the source doc is changed, then the quoted text in the destination doc is used instead. Not only is this not hypertext, it's not even smart. A changed paragraph in the source doc doesn't automatically update the composite doc; instead the link breaks, and whatever was there (which better be a verbatim quote of the original if you want to maintain the illusion of solidity) is displayed. If you're required to quote verbatim and can't maintain a link if the text is changed, then what's the point of the link?? Attribution should be encapsulated within the source file, so that when you copy it, you don't lose your connections. The _Connections.txt file doesn't even follow the standard described at Transliterature.org. Try it.
Rule 7 states that "links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints". This is fine for a severely restricted set of documents, but for something the size and complexity of the Web it's not even a good idea. Really... I want you to imagine for a moment how you would sort out the back-links from, say a Wikipedia page to every single document to which it's linked. That's exactly what's described by this rule, and it's insane. I realize that if the fiction that is Xanadu were made reality, it wouldn't be Wikipedia. But something very much like Wikipedia would have to exist, or the system is worthless. In fact, the whole project, as described, is very much like a Wiki, with the addition of some very bad ideas, which we'll see next. But that kind of confusion doesn't happen with Xanadu, because the links aren't globally shared. Being, as they are, in a _Connections.txt document, they aren't maintained outside of your own little "literaverse", which presumably would be defined by your "Xanadu Server" if such a thing existed. This, of course, means that as you transfer a document to another reader outside of your little world, you must also separately transfer the connections, as well as ensure that he has access to all of the source files if the linkages are to be preserved. Of course, in the demo, XanaduSpace maintains the illusion of unbreakable links in that deleting a source file doesn't result in disappearing text, but that's simply because the text is directly quoted, only to be replaced by the transcluded text. Because _Connections.txt has no source metadata other than the location of the source file and the quoted text, traditional attribution is superior to this weak scheme.
Rule 8 states that permission to link a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication, but applying Rule 9, we learn that this permission is contingent on royalty payments. Not only is this one of those Bad Ideas that I mentioned, it presents a legal challenge which I'll address below.
Rules 10 through 14 and rule 16 are boring housekeeping. Lotus Notes servers routinely provide all of these capabilities.
Rule 15 states that any provider can charge you anything they choose for their services, but those of us with long memories know that Rules 12 and 13 mean you don't know where it's stored. Together, these rules spell, "it sucks to be you." Again, this isn't a big deal if we're talking tiny data worldlets in academia, but connect them into something the size of the Web and we're talking about a system that has nothing to recommend it over what we have, and plenty to argue against it.
Xanadu a lot of new words. Unnecessary words, to be sure, like flink and clink, but some that are necessary to understand just to be able to show how remarkably bad they are.
Transcopyright
For instance, there is the issue of transcopyright. Basically it's a license that says other people can use your stuff, and at that level it's no different at all from the Creative Commons. Quite frankly, in that we already have the Creative Commons, transcopyright is a duplication of effort, and therefore a complete waste of time.
But that's not where transcopyright ends. Integral to the concept is micropayments, which would be automatically deducted from your accounts for amounts below a certain threshhold (five cents is advanced as an example). AND, this micropayment system would be enforced for mere "snippets" of information. This is the legal challenge I mentioned above. It may be a news flash to those who wish otherwise, and who really, really want micropayments for every damned thing, but under the Berne Convention and Title 17 of the U.S. Code, I DON'T NEEDPERMISSION to quote a document. I am allowed fair use of that document under certain broad conditions, including news, commentary, educational purposes, or satire. In short, copyright cannot trump my free speech rights. So, for instance, when I quoted the Xanadu homepage, above, I not only didn't ask permission, but before I ever seek permission I will pull down my pants and fart Swanee River.
Now, you could impose a system whereby micropayments are enforced before I could link the page. But that would just encourage me to quote the page conventionally for free, as I am quite nicely empowered to do by the law, rather than link it. Such a system would discourage use of itself, which is double-plus ungood if you're looking to overthrow a paradigm.
Transliterature
Then there is the concept of the "transliterary standard". Ignore for a moment the monumental pretentiousness of the text... this is, after, all written by the man who coined the term "hypertext", so he is allowed a higher level of bombastic declamation than most of us.
But most of the things he describes here are either already available or simply a bad idea. For example:
Zotero provides all of the practical "transclusion" capabilities in XanaduSpace. This allows you to pull references from the web (for instance), and include them in Word or OpenOffice.org documents. The bibliographical information and formatting exceeds that described by the Xanadu project.
Quotations and comments on a document are commonplace. That's what the collaboration features of MS Office, OpenOffice, or Lotus Notes are for.
Ditto for "shared workgroup writing-spaces where different contributions are recognizable."
Likewise for "profuse and varied links of many types by different authors, overlapping freely."
In fact, all of the what-ifs involving document management are commonplace.
Regarding Better Tools, "pull across editing" is commonplace as well, it's what we know as "drag and drop". In practice, you see something on a web page, you drag it, you drop it in your document. Done. Now, what this doesn't do is provide you with attribution, which is easily fixed by using Zotero. It's not necessary to visually show rubber bands connecting quoted text with the source document so long as it's attributed, and in fact, that would simply be distracting and undesirable. Let's use Nelson's own work to illustrate how distracting that is. Follow the link to his "transquoter page" and mouse over it. Can you imagine anything more annoying as you're trying to read a document? Zotero provides quotes and bibliographical references including hyperlinks to the source documents... a superior system.
Regarding Generalizing the Document, the transliterary standard ignores that layout is often part and parcel of a copyrighted work. There is a reason that formats like PDF strive to preserve the visual impact of a page while still allowing hypermedia. This criticism doesn't apply only to magazines. Imagine how applying the transliterary standards described would effectively rape the works e.e. cummings.
When he presents the concept of "flying documents", and "sworphing" around (swooping + morphing), Nelson takes on the role of the pot in order to call the kettle black. This physical representation (albeit in virtual space), is exactly a case of treating documents as if they are "paper". If you've watched the video you've seen first-hand how wasteful of screenspace it is, and how slow. If you've downloaded XanaduSpace you've experienced how it ignores the mouse and doesn't provide clickable links. "Flying" through a forest of pages is not a good idea. I had a friend who developed a 3-D art gallery for the Web. It was a terrible idea. While it's all very kitzy to say "ooh, here's my art gallery, it's just like being there," it's not just like being there, and it wouldn't be desirable if it were. 3-D representations of 2-D objects distort them, just as they distort the text of the documents in XanaduSpace. And flying or walking around is slow and tedious compared to teleporting from place to place, as hyperlinks of the Web allow you to do. Computers shouldn't model reality, they should improve it. Nelson knows this. It's sad that he didn't embrace his own knowledge in developing XanaduSpace.
Summing up
I'll finish this up by commenting on a quote of Nelson's:
Nelson couldn't be more wrong. While it's true that literature has been around as long as the alphabet, it's also true that each generation... each individual... categorically does own its own literature, lock, stock, and barrel. Given that, like every generation of teenagers, Ted Nelson doesn't own anything but that which he creates, the admonition above is patently silly, especially from a man who takes great pains to develop and promote a system that would enforce "intellectual property" rights even when they conflict with Constitutional free speech. Would William Shakespeare, or Cicero, or even Hammurabi berate him in similar fashion? And would he have the hubris to take offense?
What we have in Xanadu is too little, too late, too weak, too flawed, too misguided, and too duplicative, too primitive. All XanaduSpace provides is an arguably pretty view of flat documents. It's 40 years of sizzle and no steak at all. Ignore it.
There have been a few new product announcements that have really amazed me lately due to their obvious "me-too"-ness where the press have somehow been hoodwinked into believing that there's something innovative going on. All I can conclude is that the computing media are made up of sheltered children who never saw a computer before they graduated and got their current jobs.
Specifically I'm thinking about the eBook reader market. Many years ago, Apple came out with a small tablet computer called the Newton. Palm followed with the PalmPilot. The Newton was revolutionary, in that it sprang fully-formed from the imagination of the designers with all of the necessary features of a touch-screen PDA. However, it was pretty bulky for its targeted purpose... a PDA should ideally fit comfortably in your shirt pocket, along with a pen or two. The PalmPilot solved the size issue, and it was incredibly power-stingy, as well. The Palm III ran on double-A batteries, and mine typically lasted longer than a week. I got similar life out of a single charge of my Palm E2. These devices were very close to being perfect PDAs, in my opinion. Where they fell down was on connectivity. You were still tethered to your computer for synchronization.
Enter RIM and the Blackberry. It was ugly, it was chunky, the screen was tiny, and it lacked the nifty graffiti handwriting recognition of the Palm. But it could connect wirelessly and your email could be "pushed" to you. Based on the email push alone, I watched several large businesses change direction and switch from Palm to Blackberry.
In the meantime, Microsoft created Windows CE, which became Windows Mobile, which became the basis of a number of bulkier and busier and more bloated palmtop PCs and telephones. People expect that the Windows logo would mean quality, and bought them. But wereas the Palm would power up immediately to exactly the same spot you left it last, Windows Mobile devices were stuck with the same sort of startup screens, logos, and sounds that you'd expect on a PC. They were also stuck with the same "Start" menu, which ignores the form-factor of the device and is simply a brain-dead design choice. Add to this the insistence of Microsoft that palm computers should run Word, Excel, and... of all things... PowerPoint, and you've got a recipe for disaster. Microsoft has no idea what a palmtop computer is best at, and they sell to people who have no experience to the contrary, and who are soon frustrated.
For these reasons I credit Windows Mobile with giving palmtop computing a bad name and setting the stage for what was to happen next...
Along came the iPhone and stole RIM's customers. This was definitely a revolutionary device. A phone with no buttons, where the input area was totally dependent on the requirements of the moment. The iPhone one-upped Star Trek. But then a very funny thing happened. Apple released a stripped-down iPhone that lacked the phone. They called it the iPod Touch, although the only thing it really had in common with the previous iPods was the ability to play music. The user interface was changed; and you now had the ability to run "Apps"... basically, what Apple had done was re-introduce the old PDA concept without anyone noticing... it was the Newton all over again, but slimmed down and more useable.
Because Microsoft had so screwed up the PDA market, it was possible for Apple to make a huge splash simply by stepping, if not backwards, then to one side into the parallel reality that would have existed had Microsoft never dipped their incompetent hands into the PDA market to start with. This looked revolutionary, but only if you hadn't been using a Palm device all along. What had changed drastically, though, was that the focus on the Touch was on entertainment, not productivity. Apple took the great idea of the PDA and re-introduced it as a toy. The users are having none of that, though, and are doing their best to fill in the blanks with productivity software.
Also in the meantime, Palm had added Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to the Palm line. They also added telephony with the Treo, but that's not the direction we're going to follow, as the Treo was a "me-too" response to the Blackberry. The Palm T|X is decidedly the classic Palm, in the classic and logical form-factor that the iPod Touch later adopted, the good battery life, and the connectivity, as well as an SDRAM slot. It's a very good PDA. Its color screen takes up almost the whole of the device, leaving only four small buttons and a directional pad. And it supports multiple ebook reader software. I am able to surf the Web, download ebooks, and carry an entire library in SDRAM. PDFs, PRCs, PDBs, plain-text, Word docs, and MobiPocket docs are all readable. And it fits in my shirt pocket. And it's readable in a pitch-black room. In short, it does just about everything you'd expect a Kindle to do, and adds games and applications to the mix.
Which brings me to that Kindle. An oversized single purpose device, whose only saving grace is the e-paper screen (against which I prefer a backlit LCD anyway). They've gone the way of replicating the size and layout of "real" books, having forgotten that effective electronic devices NEVER just recreate physical world; they must improve on it, or fail. Paperback books became successful in the 1930s because they could fit in a pocket. The Kindle can't. It has a superfluous keyboard that's not used 99%+ of the time, and which only serves to bulk up the machine the rest of the time. It requires a subscription, because you get your books on-line, through the Kindle's own cellular connection. It's exhorbitantly expensive. And it's laden with DRM, so what you "buy" you don't "own". For many years the rule of thumb regarding software is that you should "treat it like you treat a book". But the Kindle doesn't even treat books like books. It's an EPIC FAIL in all respects except for the screen.
So I was really pleased to hear about the COOL-ER device. It's thinner, supports more sane formats, doesn't sport that stupid, stupid keyboard, and is just might fit in that pocket. And it's about half the price of the Kindle. But even with all these improvements, there's something still nagging at me...
It's the Palm T|X that is in my pocket right now. It does every single thing I've seen claimed for the COOL-ER and Kindle, supports more ebook formats, has a backlit LCD that's readable in the dead of night, has gobs of applications and games available, and can surf the web and synchronize from anywhere in the world over the Web to my home PC to get emails and appointments. I bought mine at a discount, for $99... less than half the price of the COOL-ER, and less than one quarter of the price of the Kindle. Likewise, it's a fraction of the price of the iPod Touch. (Though in this case, I'd say that the 16GB Touch, with its multimedia and extended storage, is worth the difference). I can't see for the life of me why anyone would buy anything marketed as an ebook reader, most especially the Kindle, but also the COOL-ER, when the superior choice is cheaper.
And this is my frustration. We started with what works (Newton). We moved to what works better (Palm). And then we threw all of that out of the window for ten years while everyone ooh'ed and ah'ed over the Windows mobile crap (and it's crap by any standard) until we could get something that worked again (in the iPhone), that was basically what we started with, with improvements.
And still, people are tossing underpowered, vastly overpriced crap like the Kindle into the market while all the while, the venerable Palm T|X beats the pants off of every single brand-spankin'-new right-out-of-the-factory ebook reader made by anyone anwhere in the world. And the iPhone and iPod Touch are better still. It's enough to make you despair.
But there's hope that some people still "get it". Palm has just released a better-still choice in the Palm Pre, which combines the multi-touch capabilities of the iPod Touch with multi-tasking and telephony. And it's got that nifty TouchStone charger. And Google's Android platform provides a more open solution not just for phones, but for desktops as well, if Ubuntu's parents Canonical have their way.
News flash for the pundits: the Palm Pre isn't a smart-phone... it's a PDA with telephony. It's exactly what Palm does best. They forgot that for some time, but they're back. And now we're hearing whispers of Palm's new OS as the basis of new small tablet PCs.
Here's another news flash for the pundits: Look back over this history. Take a look at what what Apple's done with the iPhone and Touch, which take back the position they once held with the Newton. Look at the Palm Pre, and the fact that it will run both new apps and apps that were written for older Palm devices. Then go eat some crow. The PDA isn't dead, and it never was.
Not only does he pass on general principles in an entertaining way; he provides advice on specific techniques and tools to make you more productive.
Now here are my totally self-serving observations:
Randy mentions that [as of the time of the talk] no one had invented an email program that sorts by importance. Well then, thumbs up for VIC CRM, as it comes as close as it's possible. VIC auto-categorizes emails as they arrive, by category, company, and contact. All you need to know is who or what is important to you.
I also had to smile when Randy mentions keeping your emails forever. I couldn't agree more. I've got records going back to the day I first started testing the first version of VIC. Lotus Notes' full-text search facility is absolutely fantastic for finding the odd bit of knowledge that you knew you'd discussed, but can't remember when, or with who.
Also Randy recommends keeping a "life journal". Again, I agree entirely: that's what VIC CRM is. When you talk to someone on the phone, you document it in a Journal Entry. When you have a face-to-face meeting you schedule it with and document it in a Journal Entry. Letters, Faxes, and Emails are all media of conversations that are stored in the very same Journal. Everything you do is a conversation. Everything you do is interaction. Everything you do is in the Journal.
If you're a single user, VIC CRM is an indispensible tool. It's the single most useful tool on my computer. VIC is an eidetic memory augmenting my own. It keeps up with birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, contracts, phone numbers, receipts, registrations, and general information. It remembers my conversations and reminds me to follow up where necessary. It reminds me what I've done that's billable, and reminds me to bill, and what to bill, and when the work was done, and why. It helps me manage projects. It even dials the phone for me. It's the best secretary I've ever had.
For a small organization, using a shared implementation of VIC CRM, it's not just your life journal, it's the company's. Everything I just said above applies to a shared implementation in spades. Remember that VIC is there to share information. If you want something that will hide some info from some people, then look elsewhere, please. This is for teams, not cliques. With VIC, you can search not just your correspondence with a customer, but all correspondences... those among your customers, but also between your staff members. VIC remembers it all. This means that when you're talking to "Acme's" general manager, you can see what your colleagues discussed with them. All promises are communicated throughout your organization. If you don't use VIC, you need something like it. You don't know what you're missing.
But whatever you do, use something that works for you. And do watch Randy's talk.
