Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Is Twitter insane?

posted this on

One of the many parts of the Twitter Api 1.1 thats been quite ambiguous is the part about quoting tweets:

We will require all applications that display Tweets to adhere to [the display requirements]. Among them: linking @usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile, displaying appropriate Tweet actions (e.g. Retweet, reply and favorite) and scaling display of Tweets appropriately based on the device.1

It is not one hundred percent clear what an application means in this case. Marco Arment took a pessimistic approach:

I’m pretty sure this means that I can’t just display a tweet as a link and blockquote when I want to quote it here.2

When I first read that I shook my head in disbelief. ”They can’t possibly be that creepy and control-freaky, can they?” According to Jeremy Keith, turns out they can:

Just to double-check, I asked one of my (many) friends who work at Twitter. “These display requirements …they don’t apply to me quoting a tweet on my blog, right?”

The answer I got surprised me. Apparently the display guidel… requirements do apply to me. If I want to quote a tweet on my website, I’m supposed to use the embed code to make sure that people can favourite/retweet/follow, etc.3

Now, read that quoted part again and think about what it really means. Whatever you write on Twitter, they claim ownership of. Not only that, but they actually go so far as to suddenly dictate how you are allowed to quote the things written on their service. That completely violates years and years of writing tradition and, probably, a whole bunch of laws regarding fair use etc.

I’m not sure what Twitter is trying to pull here, but apparently they have gone completely insane. I hope every blogger in the world violates this. As long as you’re not an app developer, Twitters only response can be to take actual legal actions against it and I can’t possibly see how they could win such a case.

(What about newspapers? At least in Sweden newspapers sometimes quote famous peoples tweets in there printed edition. How the hell should they comply with this?)

  1. Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API | Twitter Developers ↩
  2. Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes – Marco.org ↩
  3. Adactio: Journal—Tweetpolice ↩
∞

What Killed the Linux Desktop – Miguel de Icaza

posted this on

Many hackers moved to OSX. It was a good looking Unix, with working audio, PDF viewers, working video drivers, codecs for watching movies and at the end of the day, a very pleasant system to use. Many exchanged absolute configurability of their system for a stable system.1

I hesitate to call myself a hacker, but this paragraph pretty much sums it up for me as well.

In my pre-Mac life I had a computer with a Windows (mostly XP) partition for my audio work and a Linux partition for my development work. Nowadays the needs of both jobs happily coexist under the roof of OS X. I can run stable no fuzz audio recording and sequencing programs side by side with a Unix terminal.2

  1. What Killed the Linux Desktop – Miguel de Icaza ↩
  2. Yes, off-cource you can do development and audio work on Windows as well. I just love the fact that all the Unix tools that I love to use is available next to my audio tools. ↩
∞

Hösten är här. Blandade känslor. Sorgligt och vackert.

posted this on and tagged it with snapshots
Hösten är här. Blandade känslor. Sorgligt och vackert.
∞

Marco Arment comments on Twitters blocking of Tumblr

posted this on

So when Twitter says something like “[developers] will need to work with us” to “identify areas of value” when they get big enough for Twitter to notice, I don’t have high hopes for what “working with us” might actually entail.

This is how Twitter treats its “partners”.1

  1. Twitter cuts off “find friends” access to Tumblr, too – Marco.org ↩
∞
posted this on and tagged it with Kefalonia

Klicka på bilderna för att se dom i större format och läsa bildtexterna.

∞
posted this on and tagged it with Kefalonia

Klicka på bilderna för att se dom i större format och läsa bildtexterna.

∞

@_DavidSmith did the math on the new twitter API guidelines

posted this on

Back of the envelop: App price: $3 User Cap: 100k Apple Cut 30%. Hourly Rate: $150/hr => Max of 35 man-weeks of development supported1

Quite informative. 35 man-weeks sound like a fair amount of time for a low-complexity novelty app to me, but for a full fledged power user Twitter client it seems waaaay to little to succeed in the long run.

Yes, we do already have a lot of third party twitter client and based on Tapbots’ reactions it seems like things aren’t so bad, at least not for them, but who’s to say that the greatest third party twitter client hasn’t yet been released?

  1. Twitter / _DavidSmith: Back of the envelop: App price: … ↩
∞

Amy Worrall on businesses charging money

posted this on

Take the example of a cleaning service. People don’t get outraged that their cleaner charges money.1

Amy Worrall really nails it in regards to the negative voices that’s currently being raised toward app.net.

I dont’t see why some people have such a hard time seeing why a web service charging money from their users can be a good thing. Any business needs customers, someone who pay for their product. Web services, applications etc. also needs users. Either the customer and the user are the same person, or we have the more common situation where the user is what is actually being sold to the actual customer; the advertisers. This is what I like to call the Customer or Cattle situation, or dilemma.

Personally I prefer being the customer, but if what a service offers me is good enough, or their monetization of me is unobtrusive and non-evil enough, I can consider being a cattle as well. Twitter has been a great example of that. But as of this weeks announcement of API rules changes the situation is likely to change.2

  1. Businesses charging money is not morally wrong ↩
  2. Yes, I have signed up for App.net. ↩
∞

My short review of The Dark Knight Rises

posted this on

Meh.

∞

Optimizing for a laptop size retina display

posted this on

Sylvain Galineau is not happy about web developers caring about the Retina MacBook Pro:

To show they understand the risks of a -webkit monoculture, developers now working hard to optimize sites for the .1% with Retina Macbooks.1

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, off-hand remark where one web developer berates others for targeting the Retina MacBook Pro. In my not so humble opinion, this is crap.

Yes it would be stupid to invest a lot of time and effort in the Retina MacBook Pro, if it was just an odd curiosity that would make no lasting impression on the computer business, but it is likely not. Look at the iPhone, look at the iPad, look at the MacBook Airs. They all had a lot of critics and doubters early on, it seemed dumb to focus on them in one way or the other, but look where we are now. Touch-screen smartphone, tablet computers and ”ultra book”2 laptops are the hottest thing since sliced bread. Why is it so likely that the same will not happen with high resolution laptop (and eventually even desktop) screens?

Or if that doesn’t convince you, look at the pc itself. Resolution has slowly increased, screens has gotten better and crisper. Why wouldn’t these improvements continue to happen? Maybe the Retina MacBook Pro will fail, but progress will still happen. Possibly not as fast, but inevitably it will.

Let’s just take another look at yesterday’s post by Gruber:

But now this. The 15-inch MacBook Pro With Retina Display. This is a boom. A revolution in resolution. The display I’ve been craving ever since I first saw high-resolution laser printer output.3

Ah, so you say Gruber, and everybody else who praise the display, is just a fanboy? How about Matt Mullenweg?

John Gruber has a great essay on the paradigm shift (yes I just said that) of the Retina Macbook Pro. Highly recommended.4

If we’d never target new up and coming technology, why would anyone ever have started using web standards, semantic HTML, CSS? Why didn’t everyone settle for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4?

  1. http://twitter.com/sgalineau/status/233635398788718592 ↩
  2. Intel’s euphemism for MacBook Air knock-offs. ↩
  3. Daring Fireball: Pixel Perfect ↩
  4. Matt Mullenweg — aka Photo Matt — on WordPress, Web, Jazz, Life, and Photography ↩
∞

Profile Photo © Henrik Carlsson