A look to the past to guide us towards the future. This is a candid, level headed, and enjoyable talk about the way we've failed users.

_Harry Halpin and Blaine Cooke go through the history of standards for social networks and identity, and why they failed._

_The Augmented Social Network_ [1] 1995
RDF/FOAF
EmotionML
RSS -> Atom -> ActivityStreams
XRIs
XMPP
OpenID
OAuth
OpenID 2.0
OpenSocial
PubSubHubbub/Salmon
OpenGraph (HTML for Facebook)
ActivityStreams 2.0 (W3C Social)
Blockchains

[1] http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1068

http://redecentralize.org/conf2015/2016/09/07/13-ten-years-of-standards-failure.html

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*Good*: Facebook killed the profile 2 minutes after I reported it for impersonation. Also a great way to get in touch with old friends as they ask 'was that you?'.

*Bad*: the grammar.

*Ugly*: 19 people had friended that profile before it was taken down.

Be vigilant out there....

https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6325073859824754257/6325073857645853762?...

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Handwritten in pencil.

Yours truly,
Paul

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Hmm, I wonder what s/Node_Modules/blaze-bin/ would reveal..

PB for evil respect to anyone that can implement Hot Pockets example...

https://medium.com/friendship-dot-js/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-wh...

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Given all the #firstsevenjobs posts going on I decided to see if I could find my first published source code. And lo and behold the Internet Archive FTW.

https://archive.org/details/1987-06-compute-magazine

As for 1st 7 jobs: Fish House Cleaner, Dock Boy, Rock Picker, Upholsterer Assistant, Commodore 64 hacker, Injection Plastic Press Operator, Library Book Shelver.

Cleaning up stinky crap and rote mechanical tasks? -- I'm your guy.

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WebTorrent one-off file sharing in the browser.

This link will die when the last person closes their browser tab..

https://instant.io/#120d24519a9789b9a0890ba3944e55ab2831b53b

mmm spaghetti

https://instant.io/

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Orkut.com is back. Promoting hello.com

Of course Orkut could probably retire just by serving ads on 404 responses.

http://orkut.com

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I found my first email to Google. From the year 2000. Since then I've worked through five companies, but Joan Braddi is still here.

And since I'm on the inside now I was able to find the that cl #8802 referenced the work I was doing at the time, which was adding search to www.redhat.com. (Or Red hat, as you can see here)

https://critique.corp.google.com/#review/8802/depot/eng/clientwork/CompletedSites.html

I do have to wonder if Red Hat's slow payment of their 5k+ contract fees hurt the early Google, or what might have happened had Google gotten into the RPM search field as I suggested to them way back when...

And for a real blast from the past see the search stats that were emailed out monthly(!)

https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/d/msg/partner-reports/XiVcELeVONc/AtcwCeBS7uYJ

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I asked an SRE intern if they ran their own server. Said no; but at least they had their own VPS. Made me realize how much I've learned by maintaining a home server for the past 16 years.

While I don't run my own email anymore I still have secondary DNS, NFS, Plex, Docker, IPv6 tunnel and local LAMP stack for projects.

I can highly recommend the Supermicro you see here. 20-30w at idle, super quiet, 8 cores, up to 128GB of RAM, 10GbE, NVMe and much more. I've been running this for 7 months now and it was a big improvement over the Rackable I used to run.

http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-sys-5028d-tn4t-review-small-box-big-power/

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Ello ships their version of Wanderland focused on their artist/creator content.

The interesting part is they let you flip between:

Discover, Followed and Starred

Worth a look.

https://ello.co/discover/all

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*Uninvited Guests* - Human Agency[1] vs Machine Agency.

I found this gem via a CHI paper. I think it covers a number of pitfalls that can be avoided by insuring that we're designing products that emphasize Human Agency. It also underscores how privacy (especially between the device owner and the device user) is critical.

Also consider if instead of grandchildren the devices were provided by the NHS or Medicare.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

Ultimately it is our intention that this, at times comedic story, plays on and gives form to some of the growing tensions between human and machine agency. And in doing so, provoke questions about how we want to live and grow old in an increasingly technologically mediated word.

http://www.superflux.in/work/uninvited-guests

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Interesting ideas that protocols can be monetized thus leading to more diversity.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Large players have many more levers to get their protocols adopted and defend their turf.

There's also the risk that all new protocols will _require_ monetization so governments and internet infrastructure orgs can extract rents/taxes from the activity on the network.

On the other hand if the Gopher Protocol was monetized I might be sipping drinks on the beach instead of toiling in the protobuf mines...

http://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-and-the-coming-age-of-protocol

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Also there's this: _Diverse teams that design for themselves are able to address the needs of diverse audiences, as opposed to teams that design for ‘the other’_

https://ind.ie/ethical-design/

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Current status: detangling legacy code that uses fava extensions, modules and services wrapped in factories.

https://archive.org/details/p3telephonymanua00abbouoft

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Lots to think about today:
- Everyday uses for the Optimal Stopping problem.
- Application of Ad Algorithms for Exploit vs Explore. [1]
- Sorting algorithms for unreliable comparators
- AI Ethics: Paperclip Maximization[1] and the Repugnant Conclusion[3]

All after watching this:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/jun/20/algorithms-live/

And I now have yet another book to put on my reading list....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

http://algorithmstoliveby.com/

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Saw this generated byline recently and it really rubbed me the wrong way. It devalues Laurie as an artist in her own right and is certainly not how people present oneself to one another.

The byline is also unnecessary, the information is listed below in a more neutral way.

Reported at http://go/bad Need to also file a bug on the inability to report feedback on this text.

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*Mightybell*: It's Ning for Mobile

About the only thing Recruiters are useful for is notifying me of the latest VC funded startups...

fyi to Steve Hardt

https://mightybell.com/

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_...in this place it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place._

If a Google project doesn't have enough headcount to keep up with the constant churn you can bet that it will eventually go extinct.

[Also of note, suboptimization[1]; given our recent strategy with messaging clients...]

[1] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUBOPTIM.html

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html

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*Updates* - Indieweb

And since Ade mentioned IndieWeb, here's a good writeup of what's going on in that community.

I did get to chat with Tantek a bit at the Decentralized Web conference. We bemoaned the lack of UX voices.

Fun fact: My first project at Google was supposed to be a SWAT0 implementation.

http://tantek.com/2016/190/b1/state-of-indieweb-summit

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This is a good primer on technologies used to turn centralized into decentralized.

https://blog.mousereeve.com/technologies-of-the-decentralized-web-summit/

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An insightful read. Interesting commentary too.

_Stripping out the “smart” aspects of a Smart Contract, it is still a contract, albeit wrapped in a new-and-improved packaging of object-orientated programming and cheap, distributed computing power. Contracts are not new. And neither are their limitations._

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/ethereum-and-smart-contract-unicorn-woo-woo-there-should-be-a...

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One of my favorite terms. Assumes knowlege of ISO Networking Layers. Also for a future googledictionary.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8

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http://www.laputan.org/mud/

A classic worth revisiting occasionally...

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*Feedburner* on the chopping block? Surprised it lasted this long.

The code is oooold, I tried upgrading it's usage of Apache Commons v2->v3 a while ago and owners were reluctant to allow even that level of cleanup....

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mwQfraSAROtYsDIq9f-JGZeocSDkObYMj1LgE_yiO8E/edit?_escaped_fragme...

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☠ Annoying Oz Deprecation warnings coming soon. ☠

1. Gather list of build targets used outside of Oz.
2. Write witty sayings
3. Pipe targets to buildozer shell script

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
read line || exit
buildozer "set deprecation ☠\ \ Quitting\ Oz\ Now\ Greatly\ Reduces\ Risks\ to\ Your\ Code\ Health\ ☠\ "
read line || exit
buildozer "set deprecation ☠\ \ Oz\ Causes\ Code\ Bloat and May Complicate Pregnancy\ ☠\ "
read line || exit
buildozer "set deprecation ☠\ \ Oz\ contains\ Carbon\ Monoxide ☠\ "
done

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