Software Development

There are 90 posts filed in Software Development (this is page 2 of 9).

Who should be working together on Textcasting?

In recent posts, Dave Winer has been bringing up the “working together” mantra in regards to the Textcasting concept. This has been a difficult concept for me to grasp – working together with who? Today, Dave sheds a little more light on this:

When I say textcasting is “applying the philosophy of podcasting to text” — what I mean in practical terms is that my flow of ideas is available “where ever you get your text.” Choice in subscribing has to be that fluid, commonsense, and choice is something people feel entitled to, as they do with podcasts. I’ve been told people would never understand the philosophy of podcasting, but they do, they understand they’re entitled to choice in how to listen and thus producers are free to choose where to publish. Somehow text, which is so much easier to transmit than audio, is far less flexible. That’s a mistake I want to undo, but I can’t do it alone. I need to work with other people who have writing and reading tools, and people who have something to say and want all the features of writing to be at their disposal, and for it to be easy, inexpensive but not free of charge, and not owned by the titans of tech. (bold/italics emphasis by Andy Sylvester)

from http://scripting.com/2023/12/30.html#a160414

I think the key part of the highlighted text is “other people who have writing and reading tools” – that is, people who are involved in developing writing and reading tools, or the primary developers of reading and writing tools. Dave Winer did press Bluesky to add RSS feeds as a native feature in the Bluesky client, and this occurred on December 22. He has also developed some software to be able to post to WordPress, Mastodon, and Bluesky via a REST call, so I guess these three platforms are not the ones Dave wants to work with?

Two other concepts in this paragraph also deserve some review:

  • my flow of ideas is available “where ever you get your text.”
  • Choice in subscribing has to be that fluid, commonsense, and choice is something people feel entitled to, as they do with podcasts.

To me, this moves beyond the “feature list” as defined at Textcasting.org. The first bullet implies that a writer should be able to publish their writing such that it can be seen in any tool. Apps that create RSS feeds of content could be read in any RSS reader, so if all writing apps created RSS feeds of the output of their apps, a user could use a RSS reader app to read that content. However, I don’t think that is the direction that the first bullet is heading. My feeling is that the real message of this bullet is “my flow of ideas should be able to be posted on any social media network without me having to re-enter my ideas into some other editor or tool”. THAT would definitely require app developers to work together to make that happen. And why would they do that? I have been thinking about the struggle to get Twitter/X/Facebook/Threads to create RSS feeds. My simplistic thought is that if users could get the content using RSS feeds without going through the platform app/interface, the users would not be exposed to the ads that that the platform has, which is the primary means of support for those applications. From that standpoint, it does not make business sense for those applications to give the content placed in their apps away in that manner.

This brings me to the second bullet mentioned above. To me, this could be a description of the “pain” experienced by Mastodon users when trying to follow another Mastodon user on a Mastodon instance different from the one that hosts their accounts. Similarly, it could also describe the pain of trying to subscribe to a RSS feed. As I mentioned earlier, THAT would definitely require app developers to work together to make that (cross-app subscription and forwarding of content) happen. And why would they do that? I don’t know. As an aside, for many podcasting apps, their feed search feature is good enough to find a podcast feed from search terms, so I don’t think that is the use case being highlighted by the second bullet.

To return to the title of this post, I think the people that need to work together on textcasting are primarily developers. As the developers have applications, they should then evangelize their work to potential users. To me, this seems to be the approach that the Textcasting “movement” needs to follow.

Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!

Who is using JSON-LD? CNN…

During the recent high news flow events for the US House speaker, CNN’s live-blog posts for a single day were a great capturing of the events as the happened. One thing that I noticed was that there did not seem to be a way to link to individual items in the blog. After doing a “view-source”, I saw this text:

What I saw appeared to be JSON-LD. I saw that there was a url item for each post. Here is a link to an item on Nancy Mace – the page comes up with that item at the top, and older items being displayed after it. Interesting…wonder who else is using technology.

Engaging and curation

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation – I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn’t it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren’t following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to “party” and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah – Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation – I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!