I’ve had an interesting conversation earlier this week with a VC guy. He’s looking at a company that is basing its business on Twitter. My immediate reaction was – there is no way I’d consider building a long-term business on top of Twitter.

That’s because I don’t think there is a long term future for Twitter.

I love Twitter. I really do. Not in the Mel Brooks sense, mind you. I use Twitter a lot (not as much as Jeff, but still :), and I value the way Twitter changed our world.

However, I believe that in 2 years the Twitter brand will be in the same position as the Netscape brand is in now: Twitter will be credited with starting the revolution, and paving the road for followers (pun intended). But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor position in the market with other players taking the lead (or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist).

Twitter is the model for open conversations. They’ve crystallized the one-way-relationship model and brought it to the masses. You can follow anyone you want. You don’t have even to be a follower to read what anyone says – just visit their stream or subscribe to it with RSS. You can @mention anyone, who may or may not @reply back.

Contrast that with the Twitter platform, which is as closed as it gets.

Can you imagine email, The Killer App for the net, being so successful if you could only email people who use the same email provider as yourself?

Could email have become so central to today’s business interactions if businesses did not have the confidence of knowing they can choose to run their own email servers and have total control over it?

Remember CompuServe? ‘nuf said.

There will be other Twitter-like microblogging services. We had Jaiku and Pownce. We have Identi.ca, TypePad Motion, and Yahoo Meme. IMO, none of them lives up to the challenge of being a worthy Twitter-contender, but it’s only a matter of time, and incentive.

Incentive? Yes. Heck, Google & Facebook tried to acquire Twitter. Usually when a corporate attempts to acquire a startup it’s in the context of a make-or-buy discussion. When the “buy” option fails, corporate usually revert back to the first option. At some point, the big content players might also realize what an important role microblogging has in content distribution.

@biz has been quoted saying that Twitter’s potential is 4B cell phones. Guess what, there is another company that is eyeing the exact same market. A company that is known for having a keen understanding of the value of capturing the user intent and monetizing it. A company that has a reasonably good shot at controlling the entire stack – hardware, software and service. What will be the default microblogging service for the Googlephone? Will it be Twitter? I doubt it.

I believe that in 2 years, we’ll have additional 2-3 “Twitter-like” services from the big players.

But more important, if you follow Dave Winer’s work, you can clearly see how – in a typical Dave Winer fashion – the blocks are being laid out, one by one – the building blocks for an open, distributed, decentralized Twitter-like experience, which is based on widely available and well known technologies instead of proprietary ones.

Facebook were able to pull off successfully a centralized service, but that is because Facebook were bold enough to actually create a “second internet” – a walled garden which duplicates pretty much all of the utilities provided by the open net. Twitter is in a different game – if it tries to recreate the Facebook experience, it will loose much of its current appeal, the simplicity and minimalism that are its trademark (or was, before the Horrible Retweet Thingie). Plus, we already have Facebook, thank you.

Twitter could switch to a WordPress-like model, where you can choose to have your blog hosted on WordPress.com, or run your own WordPress server. Twitter could lead the way in establishing a (or adapting an existing) inter-microblogging-service protocol, that allows users of one service to @mention and follow the users of another compatible service (e.g. @yanivg@twitter). Twitter could start playing nice with pingbacks and trackbacks, with rssCloud and PubSubHub, with OPML, even *gasp* with SMTP, IMAP and POP. If they do that, given their market lead, Twitter might have a prominent position in the Post-One-Twitter world.

If they don’t, they might discover that the Internet does indeed abhors a funnel.

I love the Beatles. I grew up listening to their amazing melodies, appreciating the lyrics and the rich and visual compositions. I love the Beatles and what they stood for.

Over the years I’ve replaced some of the vinyl Beatles records I had with CDs, but there were several Beatles albums that I never got around to purchasing. I kept thinking I should buy them already, but never did.

Until The Beatles Remastered was released. Clearly, this was the opportunity to fill in the blanks and reacquire the entire collection in the best available quality, and to rediscover their genius music.

Last Friday I went to Tower Records (yes, an actual physical store!), handed over the counter 999 NIS (which is about $250), and received in exchange a beautiful black box containing the entire collection. On the way home I opened the box with excitement, took out "Revolver", put it into the car CD player, and enjoyed the familiar tunes.

When I got home, I did what I always do when I buy a new music discs. I inserted the disc into my Windows 7 Media Center machine, planning to rip the music into my Media Library so that I can listen to it like I listen to the rest of my music. After I am done ripping, I usually put the original disc away in storage, because I have no real use for these plastic pieces anymore.

Not this time though. Windows recognizes the disc as a multimedia disc with videos and all, but does not see the music tracks.

I tried another disc from the box. Same result.

A quick Google revealed that this is a known issue – apparently the discs use a copy protection scheme that makes them impossible to play on a Windows machine.

I have no use for plastic discs that I cannot turn into playable media.

So I did two things: I downloaded the entire Remastered collection from a torrent in the high fidelity FLAC format, and I went back to the store and asked for a refund, on the basis that I was sold a flawed product that is unusable in a rather mainstream consumer environment.

I spoke today with Asaf Peer, support rep of Tower Records, who told me that they will not give me a refund, because:

1. Windows Media Center is not a standard CD player. But it is.
2. Some people apparently buy CDs, rip them at home and then return them and ask for a refund. But I don’t.

The Music-in-CDs business is dead. We all know that. They know that too. What baffles me is why are these guys alienating one of the few remaining paying customers by providing me with a crippled product!

Did someone over there really think that by putting a copy protection in place they’ll actually be able to stop the music from reaching the net?

Here are the facts of life:

• If it’s data, and it is stored on a medium for which there is a reader, the data will be extracted from the medium
• For every genius software engineer that comes up with a super duper copy protection scheme, there are 1000X even smarter folks on the net who are determined to break the copy protection scheme.

The other thing I cannot understand is how come Microsoft (and others?) is letting these folks render the Media Center useless, and how come consumers don’t stand up and demand their money back. The only two explanations I have for these mysteries are:

1. I am the only one using Windows Media Center
2. The rest of you didn’t waste their time on obsolete cheap plastic circles and got your Beatles Mastered from Mininova like any normal person would.

I love taking photos in unconferences like this, there are always so many interesting things happening. But the thing is that being behind the lens has the effect of somewhat disconnecting you from the actual happening.

So this year,  I thought I’ll build a replacement for myself as my GeekCon project. Initially I called it the *ConAutoDoc, but shortly after we activated it for the first time I came to the conclusion that "The Rabid Digital Junk Photos Generator" would be a much better name.

Rabid?

Yes. Rabid:

The idea was to create an autonomous robot that will tour the conference area on its own, and will continuously take pictures of whatever is happening around it, and share them in real time with the unsuspecting web at large.

The "continuously" part turned out to be somewhat limited by battery life, the "autonomous" bit turned out to be mostly-autonomous-but-with-suicidal-tendencies, and the pictures… well, the pictures turned out to be exceptionally bad:

Or, as my wife who watched the whole thing from afar aptly put it:

The sharing bit worked out great though :) the little rabid machine, built from a laptop mounted on an old Roomba (thanks Eden!), connected to a webcam (mounted on the weirdest bit of construction – thanks Avichay!) and to a 3G USB stick (because WiFi never works in conferences) happily shared the digital junk pictures it produced with Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed and AIM Lifestream.

The "sharing" bit was written in Python, which was my first ever "production" Python code with orchestration code in C# (because I  didn’t feel like figuring out how to wait for countdown video to finish playing in Python).

This wonderfully useless rabid digital junk photos generator was co-created with the following team: Amit Knaani, Orit Hashay and Avichay Nissenbaum. Amit also created a website for the project (using the amazing Wix), which, like everything else related to GeekCon, is of course already out of date :)

As for me, I couldn’t really help myself and still took a lot of pics. 162 of them actually, only 72 less than the rabid digital junk photos generator. What does that make me?

I remember my first job interview. It was back at 1991, and I was interviewed by Ron Loewy for a developer job.

Ron asked me to tell him about things I’ve done before. Having done 3 commercial projects already as a freelancer self-taught developer, I described them. They all involved long term storage / query mechanisms of some sort, and Ron asked me to describe what I used for storage.

Now, the only data structure I knew at that point was Linked List. I also knew a bit of OO that I picked up from the Object Oriented Programming Guide booklet that shipped with Turbo Pascal 5.5. So I came up with FileLinkedList (TFileLinkedList in TP-speak), which descendant from my LinkedList class. And that is what I used for storage and query in these 3 projects.

Ron listened patiently while I described my incredibly versatile FileLinkedList, waited for me to finish, and then asked – so, ever heard of a database?

Sure, I said, I heard of the Paradox Engine, but it’s kinda expensive, isn’t it?

Somehow I got the job, and we went on to write software that connected to the most bizarre databases, from Oracle, DB2 and Sybase to DB2, ISAM and VSAM.

In the meantime, I also discovered SQL and RDBMSes, wrote a bunch of ORMs, and grew up believing its the best thing since sliced linked list. The only real question when starting a new project was which RDMBS to use – Oracle or MS SQL? InterBase or Ingres?

When we started creating Yedda late 2005 this was still an important question. But as Yedda matured and needed to scale up, the question changed. It became:

How do we architect the system so that we rarely have to use the database?

Following the AOL acquisition late 2007 this question became even more critical – growth was rapid and peaks were high and mostly unpredictable. But with the help of good friends like page output cache, distributed memory cache (memcached), queues [RabbitMQ], HTTP accelerators [varnish], CDNs and others, we were able to sustain this while also serving hundreds of millions of dynamic widgets per month using a single fully normalized RDBMS database instance – with plenty of room for growth.

We were lucky though – adding so many additional layers which were not designed into the original architecture could just as well have caused the system to collapse under its own weight and require a major rewrite. I’ve seen it happen before.

In a newer system we’ve designed at AOL post-Yedda, with considerably more demanding scale, volume and responsiveness requirements, it was clear from the start that we will never be able to use an RDBMS for the online queries. The RDBMS was quickly reduced to nothing more than a long term persistent storage, with the application relaying on mem cache for most of its read operations, with persistent storage in a key-value store and the writes always going through a queue mechanism, hoping for eventual consistency :)

Making sure that somewhere behind all this there is still a normalized RDBMS with all of our data required a non-trivial effort. But it does give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, knowing that it’s there.

Will there be a RDBMS somewhere behind the scenes in my next project? I’m not sure.

It depends on the project of course. Modern web applications accumulate data so fast that a RDBMS may simply be meaningless. Using it for long term persistency is a nice idea, but I already know that if I lose my key-value store there is no practical way to rebuild it from the RDBMS in any kind of reasonable timeframe. SQL and RDBMS are supported by so many query and reporting tools, but with that much data, a map-reduce technology like Disco quickly becomes the only practical reporting infrastructure at Yedda. And so on and on. 

So what’s the point.  I might as well reuse FileLinkedList :)

Update: Breaking news – I lost my voice! No panel for me. Oh well, I am sure it will be a fascinating discussion anyway :)

The format is the usual (and effective) Bootcamp format:

• 30 Second Elevator Pitch
• 8 Minute Investor Presentation
• Network with targeted c-level investors in an intimate & interactive environment
• Receive on-the-spot feedback from leading angels, under-the radar-funds and venture capitalists from the US, Israel and Europe

On the "Drill Sergeant" Panel this time:

• Pavel Ezekiev (NEVEQ CAPITAL PARTNERS)
• Dror Nahumi (NORWEST VENTURE PARTNERS)
• Anat Segal (XENIA)
• Motti Vaknin (CEDAR FUNDS)

For more information + registration details, check out the event page.

All these eons spent crafting complex traps to get people to sign that infamous contract where they sell their soul to the devil. All that human suffering that led to the creation of Faust and of the category AT 756B.

So much wasted effort, when today all it really takes is a reasonably popular (preferably viral) web app, a well crafted TOS, and a "Yes, I agree to the terms of service" checkbox.

Do you read these terms of service? I usually scan them quickly, which is probably more than most people do. But this quick scan will probably not be enough to reveal clause 666b, which says "Furthermore, by using the Service you agree to provide the Devil with an eternal non-revocable complete ownership license for your soul".

Back when Facebook did that controversial change to its terms of service I’ve discussed with some friends a way to avoid this finely crafted trap. My suggestion consisted of the following components:

1. Service that tracks changes to the TOS of any web site
2. TOS change subscribe / alert mechanism
3. External translation of "legalspeak" TOS into "TOS Commons" – a set of standard TOS building blocks, written in "peoplespeak" by the community, microformats-enabled – similar to the Creative Commons approach.
4. API to allow access to the TOS change data, and to the "TOS Commons" version
5. Browser plugin that will automatically alert you visit a site that changed its TOS since you signed up, and displays the equivalent "TOS Commons" version
6. Widgets friendly web app builders can use to display their TOS Commons next to their legal mambo-jumbo TOS during a transition period
7. Marketing campaign to create awareness for the issue and new service by getting people to sign up for a service that includes clause 666b, and after they sign up, tell them what they signed and offer to redeem their souls by downloading the browser plugin (which, mind you, will NOT change their default search provider to 666search.com).

I never actually kickstarted any of these :) but today Eran reminded me of the TOSBack web app, released by the EFF back in June.

So, #1 and #2 are done. Perhaps #3 – #7 will be an interesting as a GeekCon project?

I’ve been using Flickr for over 4 years now. I’ve been paying for a pro account for 2 different accounts, and was happy to do that. Flickr made me happy.

But this time it was different. I did pull out my credit card, typed in the details and hit submit. But this time, it was with a heavy heart.

Flickr no longer makes me happy.

Flickr used to be a shining example of a web app that evolved with and for its users. It was led by benevolent dictators, who listened to the community, but had their own vision of “what’s right”.

As a photographer, I appreciated the little things – the emphasis on the picture as the main object. The multiple resolutions. The metadata support. As a person who builds web applications for people, I appreciated a different set of little things – the wording, the call to action, the navigational hints, the innovative discovery elements. Flickr was (and still is) smart, and at the same time, it had a soul. It felt like it was an embodiment of its creators.

The app is still smart. But the soul is gone.

For me, it started when Flickr started restricting my photostream – and then removing the restriction – on a whim. And then they killed lilly1975, also on a whim. Later I became aware of Flickr’s approach to DMCA-related takedowns. Thomas Hawk has been doing a great job pointing out that these are not isolated incidents.

But it’s not just that. What is Flickr? Is it a web site where photographers can share their work? There are many sites that do an arguably better job at that, like JPG. Is it for sharing pictures with your friends and family? Picasa Web Albums seems like a much better way to do that, and much more approachable to newbies. Quick sharing of snapshots from your mobile? Twitpic, Snap2Twitter and their many friends seem so much better at that. Is it cheap storage for your pictures? Can’t really count on it, given all these accounts-deleted-on-a-whim incidents.

So who is Flickr’s target audience?

Flickr has been trusted with some truly fine work of arts. There are amazing artists on Flickr, and they have been creating work of arts that, while hosted on Flickr, are, like all other works of art, part of the human race heritage.

I don’t think Flickr is a worthy guardian of these gems anymore.

Obviously, while these brands may “conceal the parent’s branding”, they still “benefit from its distribution network”.

So, knowing nothing about brewing beer, I turned my thoughts to the beer distribution network. Of which I also know nothing.

But one can imagine that these beer bottles are packaged into boxes, which are then loaded into trucks, which then distribute them to big and small retailers that deliver them to the end-users consumers.

Now, for the sake of the beer industry, I am hoping that these trucks that pick up the boxes and deliver them down the chain are reliable. Knowing nothing of beer distribution networks, I imagine that these trucks are owned and operated by the beer company itself, or by another reliable company with which they have a solid business relationship.

I mean, I am guessing they wouldn’t allow just anyone with a truck to just stop by the factory entrance, pick up a few boxes of beer and drive off with a vague promise to deliver them to their destination. That wouldn’t make sense. If a beer company was to use such unreliable delivery mechanism, they might find that these truck owners went out of business, or their trucks broke down, or decided to keep the beer for themselves, or were taken over by the mafia!

I really know nothing about beer distribution. But I am guessing that if I was in the business of premium beer (or Coke?), setting up my own reliable distribution network, run by my trusted op folks, connected to my BI systems, leveraging my business relationships and assets, etc, would be high on my list.

But then, I really know nothing about brewing beer or beer distribution networks.

I received a call last night from Tanya Epstein, my former colleague and mentor-in-many-ways in SmarTeam, a company I used to work for. This brought back memories from my enterprise software days, which led me to think of iXF.

iXF was one of my favorite undertakings in SmarTeam, which at that point was a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, and now no longer is at all. In a nutshell, iXF was a data format designed for storage and exchange of structured data.

How do you represent an object in XML? There are so many to do that. How do you represent a class in XML or XML Schema? SOAP perhaps? That’s a good start. But SOAP is slightly too flexible, resulting in potential incompatibilities when trying to map it back into relational database format. How do you represent the concept of a class interface though..? How do you represent revisions to an object, revisions of classes and interfaces, and all the other goodies needed to provide full fidelity, rich and yet interoperable data model?

While expressed in XML and XML Schema (duh!), iXF went way beyond these basics and defined formal, extendible representations for many useful concepts, like:

• Tabular data
• Structured object oriented data
• Schema versioning and forward compatibility
• Object versioning and change tracking
• Associating files with objects
• Packaging data, metadata and extended data into a single archive format
• And, most important, a formal extension mechanism for adding additional concepts without creating backward, forward and inter-systems compatibility issues.

Many of the concepts described in iXF were formalization of concepts we’ve implemented before, either in the series of applications based on the HADAR platform I’ve created before SmarTeam (together with Eran Tromer, Eitan Yaffe and many others), or in the incredibly flexible data model Tanya Epstein designed in SmarTeam.

Other concepts, like namespacing the class behaviors, the de-coupling of domain behaviors from class names, the change tracking mechanism and others were adapted from other domains (for example, interface declarations in programming languages), or invented specifically for iXF.

The result was an interesting beast. It was a format based on open, well defined standards (XML, XML Schema, SOAP, SOAP Messages with Attachments, XML Namespaces, MIME and ZLIB), which proved versatile enough to be used in multiple use cases, from data modeling to inter-vendor data exchange to database generation to inter-machine communication and more.

While there were a number of people signed on the iXF spec, much of the credit for in depth thinking, alignment with existing specs and creative ideas should go to a then-young software engineer named Noga Atsil.

SmarTeam no longer exists, and the original ixfstd.org web site is no longer available on the web. But being the sentimental fool that I am, I figured I’ll leave this little post behind, as a small tribute to the efforts that went into this work.

The original iXF 1.0 specifications (later revisions existed but are not salvageable anymore).

It wasn’t easy to keep to my word, since given my areas of interest, it’s nearly impossible not to run into Dave’s writing. Plus his response was a classy example of how to respond to an unfollow :)

Today I am giving up. It was Dave’s post from yesterday, “Gartner’s curve”, that finally broke down my resistance. It was simply too good – the most pragmatic, down to earth, unhyped description of what happened so far, what’s happening right now, and what will have to happen next.

I am once again following Dave Winer. His thoughts and opinions are obviously too valuable to ignore.

@Twitter: Can I has a “follow unless there is a war in the middle east” button?