I came across a quick post from Benjamin Golub in his blog about SUP (no Wikipedia page yet, anyone want to write one?), a protocol developed by FriendFeed and described in their blog. 

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

I installed the MediaRSS WordPress plugin today.  Hopefully that will mean that the picture that I included will show up in FriendFeed and other places that support Media RSS extensions.

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

I just noticed that yesterday was the 40-year anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s historic 1968 Human Augmentation demo, affectionately titled “The Mother of All Demos.”

Only slowly has this demo, Douglas, and the Stanford Research Institute team (The Augmentation Research Center, or ARC) gotten the recognition they deserve for the groundbreaking work they did here.  The system they developed was called NLS or “oN-Line System.”  Many of the concept developed for and presented here didn’t even have names back in 1968:

• The computer mouse (only recently named) as a alternative input device.
• Chording keyboard technology, a keyboard where multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously to issue a single command.
• Hypertext, or the concept of endowing a word to be a link to more information *about* that word.
• Electronic collaboration, the ability to share information and meta-information with other people in the same electronic system.
• Multimedia conferencing, sharing both audio, video, and electronic information simultaneously.
• Teleconferencing, being able to conference people in from remote locations.
• Metatext, the ability to endow text or other userland objects with contextual information.
• Email.  Do I even have to say any more here?

In certain ways, a lot of the concepts and technologies we enjoy today with our networked PCs not only were first realized in 1968, but were then immediately stuffed back into the closet because of the explosive and unforeseen growth of “personal computers” in the ’70s an ’80s.  Because they were so popular, funding for large, expensive collaborative systems such as the one in this demo dried up.

Only after years of first standalone PC use, local area networks and finally the internet did these technologies come back to the fore.

So, after 40 years, I’d simply like to say:  Doug, you and the ARC team were right.  You touched the obelisk and the rest of us ran away.  Thank you.

You can find more on Douglas Engelbart, ARC, The NLS demo and more at these links:

• Stanford’s 1968 Demo Page: “The Mouse Site”
• The Bootstrap Institute
• Invisible Revolution – a documentary

If you have ever used Twitter (and who hasn’t, these days), you already know about the service’s famous 140-character limit.  Similar to a cell phone text message, that’s all you get before you hit ‘send.’  Of course, you could break your message up into multiple short messages but the real effects of this limitation are two-fold:

• It forces Twitter users to think of brief, hopefully elegant ways to transmit (or ‘tweet’) their thoughts.
• It forces creative solutions to common problems such as sending an accompanying web address (or URL) with a tweet.

I could probably add a few more points on how this limit also defines how conversations happen on Twitter but that would be a whole different post, which has probably been covered many times by now.

For the Shorties

Let’s focus on the second point though.  Almost immediately after Twitter started picking up steam, URL-shortening services that already existed (and many more specifically for Twitter) started gaining in popularity as well.

These services, such as tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, bit.ly and many more, all do basically the same thing.  They take a standard uncompressed (and hopefully easy-to-read) URL and associate a new, coded, very short URL with it.  They do this by acting as a ‘redirect’ between you clicking on a shortened link in Twitter and ending up on the destination page.

The Pros

The benefit is clear: more of those precious 140 characters is available for actual message, less is taken up by the web address.  There are other benefits as well.  Some of these services allow customization of the shortened url (using a key word for example), and others offer statistics on just who clicked on the shortened URL and when.

The Cons

The drawbacks are also clear.  For one, you have no idea where a shortened URL goes before you click on it.  This has given rise to hugely popular internet memes such as the RickRoll, which basically is a shortened URL pointing to this YouTube video but in a tweet or other location that doesn’t indicate anything about where the link goes.  Walla, click on the link and you get rickroll’d.

Efforts have been made to make the redirect process more transparent, such as adding a custom version of the shortened URL that sends you to the redirect service with a full-text link to click on.. but these hardly get used because people want instant gratification, not the requirement of clicking through to the actual page or waiting 5 seconds, etc.

Another somewhat haphazard solution so far has been browsers and other tools that ‘expand’ the short URLs back to their original targets in-line, or at least show the target in a pop-up.  The problem has been these have been single-shot solutions for the most part, working for one particular service but not the others, and/or only working for certain sites, such as Twitter.

Prediction

So, I am predicting that we are going to see a more concerted effort in the form of a browser plug-in (say for Firefox?  Fingers crossed) or maybe a whole new browser that handles these compressed URLs natively, perhaps expanding them inline or in a popup, no matter what site you are on or what service the URL was compressed with.  In addition, publically available statistics could be gathered from the redirect page at the same time the uncompressed URL is harvested, transmitting that info back to the recipient as well.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, and so I am prognosticating that it is already being developed.  Hopefully we’ll see it soon.

Final Thought

On a final note, I’d just to think out loud, and wonder why Twitter doesn’t improve their 140-character algorithm so that it does not add the characters inside a web URL and, while we are at it, any username mentioned in the tweet (preceded by an at-sign: @) or a hashtag (preceded by a hash-sign: #).  I mean, if you are only giving us 140 characters, why can’t they all count toward message?

Tangent Post from Louis Gray: BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)

Ha!  Got your attention!  Sorry, but this article isn’t about the Space Mountain at the Magic Kingdom (or any of the knockoff rides at other Disney parks) but about FriendFeed.

Wait.. what?

I’ll break it down.  FriendFeed is a space mountain.

To wit, interacting with FriendFeed is like interacting with a mountain in space, in that it takes an enormous amount of effort to get the mountain to do anything, but once you have it moving, it’s not stopping anytime soon.

In metaphorical terms, that is what is required to really appreciate FriendFeed as an experience. To extend the metaphor further, we could say that the space mountain (or asteroid, perhaps) isn’t frozen out in deep space.  It’s more like a solar comet, spinning about a trajectory closer than Mercury.  This mountain is active.  It is almost paradoxical that a place that is so overwhelmingly active can start out being fairly slow going for the noob.

So, keep this in mind.  We can’t all be Mona — don’t give up if you aren’t a FriendFeed hero overnight.*  It’s best to start putting in your effort steadily, in the form of following interesting people, commenting on entries, showing yourself through stuff you find online via the bookmarklet and feeds.  But most of all, interact.

Comment and like.  A lot.  At first, you won’t get a lot of response from anybody.  But keep plugging away, and people will notice, and the discussion and interaction will start happening.

Consider this:  Even the least liked people on FriendFeed are well known simply by dint of their diligent effort.  Oh, they enjoy their status as underdogs, but the point is that even with many many people blocking them, they still generate conversation due to their notoriety.

So, buckle up, be patient, and enjoy your ride.

* Tamar Weinberg on FriendFeed follower activity level.