The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Alright, we've got a super special episode of the show.

00:00:04 ◼   ► We've got two guests.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Double your pleasure, double your fun.

00:00:08 ◼   ► What was that chewing gum called?

00:00:10 ◼   ► Doublemint?

00:00:12 ◼   ► Remember Doublemint? - Doublemint, maybe, yeah.

00:00:14 ◼   ► - It was always-- - Remember the ads?

00:00:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was always like you'd get like,

00:00:18 ◼   ► it was like two twin teenagers, boys or girls,

00:00:21 ◼   ► would get double the pleasure out of,

00:00:24 ◼   ► I guess like a shared piece of gum or something.

00:00:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:28 ◼   ► Brent Simmons, longtime friend of the show,

00:00:31 ◼   ► and Manton Reese, who's a longtime friend of me,

00:00:33 ◼   ► but I don't think has ever been on the show before.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - No, thanks for having me.

00:00:37 ◼   ► - And I got both of you on,

00:00:40 ◼   ► because you guys both have new stuff that's come out,

00:00:43 ◼   ► some of it you've collaborated on,

00:00:45 ◼   ► and it's all sort of interrelated.

00:00:48 ◼   ► It makes, I think it makes a lot more sense

00:00:50 ◼   ► to have you guys on together than separately.

00:00:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so too.

00:00:54 ◼   ► I've described Manton and me in a way as litter mates.

00:00:58 ◼   ► You know, we kind of came up around the same time

00:01:00 ◼   ► and we have a lot of the same values and, you know,

00:01:02 ◼   ► 90s scripting and web and Mac and all that good stuff.

00:01:07 ◼   ► So it's not surprised that we're still, you know,

00:01:10 ◼   ► collaborating on stuff so many years later.

00:01:14 ◼   ► - So one of the things,

00:01:15 ◼   ► it's not even one of the major announcements, I mean,

00:01:16 ◼   ► but I'll just list them up front.

00:01:18 ◼   ► We've got a JSON feed,

00:01:20 ◼   ► which is a new format for syndication of content in JSON format.

00:01:25 ◼   ► We've got micro.blog, which is a microblogging platform

00:01:30 ◼   ► that Manton just launched about a month ago.

00:01:35 ◼   ► We've got other cool stuff related to feeds, Brent.

00:01:39 ◼   ► But then one of the other things you're working on right now, Brent,

00:01:41 ◼   ► is you are working on a modernization or just getting Frontier to run again.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Well, it really is pretty much a ground up rewrite.

00:01:52 ◼   ► You know, I have the old source code that, you know, with me and I can

00:01:56 ◼   ► do a build on a 10.6.8 virtual machine, but otherwise I'm rewriting it

00:02:01 ◼   ► almost entirely in Swift.

00:02:03 ◼   ► So it's, you know, it's going to be all new code or almost all new code.

00:02:08 ◼   ► And man, you were a big Frontier user back in the day, right?

00:02:11 ◼   ► I was absolutely.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I built a bunch of web related things in Frontier and

00:02:18 ◼   ► gosh, it's so long ago now, but yeah, I was a big fan of the design,

00:02:21 ◼   ► how it thought about scripting integrated with the database.

00:02:26 ◼   ► It's just a great platform. I'm glad to see it's getting some new life.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Maybe some new people will discover it.

00:02:32 ◼   ► So one of you guys take this. At a high level, can you explain to somebody

00:02:36 ◼   ► who doesn't know what Frontier was? And I think it's fair at this point

00:02:39 ◼   ► to talk about it in the past tense, because it doesn't, right now, today,

00:02:42 ◼   ► it doesn't really run on a modern platform, even though there's...

00:02:46 ◼   ► It's complicated, right?

00:02:48 ◼   ► - It is.

00:02:49 ◼   ► - Old code never dies completely,

00:02:50 ◼   ► but can somebody take a high level overview

00:02:53 ◼   ► of just what Frontier was?

00:02:54 ◼   ► - I can give that a try.

00:02:58 ◼   ► I'm so close to it though,

00:02:59 ◼   ► that I don't know if I've ever been good at this.

00:03:02 ◼   ► At a high level, it's a scripting system

00:03:05 ◼   ► with a database and a user interface.

00:03:08 ◼   ► So it makes persistence really, really easy.

00:03:12 ◼   ► 'Cause the database is tables

00:03:14 ◼   ► which can contain objects and other tables,

00:03:17 ◼   ► and it's schema-less.

00:03:19 ◼   ► So storing stuff forever is just as easy as using key paths,

00:03:24 ◼   ► which then map to locations in the database.

00:03:28 ◼   ► So foo.bar.x equals, you know, whatever you want it to be,

00:03:32 ◼   ► a string or a number or an outline

00:03:34 ◼   ► or any number of different things.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And for some reason, that just makes development

00:03:41 ◼   ► really, really rapid and really fun, really easy.

00:03:45 ◼   ► There's more to it than that, but that's a high level.

00:03:48 ◼   ► - So one of the things, it sounds so trivial,

00:03:51 ◼   ► and for people out there, and again,

00:03:53 ◼   ► I don't wanna bore anybody,

00:03:54 ◼   ► I'm not gonna turn it into a programming podcast,

00:03:55 ◼   ► but the persistence of data was literally non-trivial,

00:04:00 ◼   ► I mean, trivial in Frontier.

00:04:06 ◼   ► It was as easy to store something permanently to disk

00:04:09 ◼   ► by writing it to the object database as it was to write it to a temporary variable that

00:04:14 ◼   ► it dies when the script stops running.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. As you're typing, there's no difference between a local variable

00:04:23 ◼   ► and a persistent location.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Even a programming language like Perl, which is the language I'm personally most familiar

00:04:33 ◼   ► with and which is famous or infamous depending on your perspective for making it possible to be a

00:04:41 ◼   ► very very terse and write minimal lines of code to do the most things. Just to write something to

00:04:48 ◼   ► a file at a minimum is still three or four lines of code where you get a file handle to a path in

00:04:54 ◼   ► the file system and then you open the file and test to make sure that it worked and then you can

00:05:00 ◼   ► print to the file handle and whatever you print to the file handle be written to the file. Whereas in

00:05:05 ◼   ► Frontier, you literally would just pick a name for your object, you know, whatever dot whatever dot

00:05:12 ◼   ► whatever equals foo and then later on whatever dot whatever dot whatever you can read from it and it

00:05:17 ◼   ► says foo. Yeah, yeah, it's literally no harder than just, you know, assigning a value to a local

00:05:24 ◼   ► variable. Just as easy as that. And it came out—originally, Frontier came out, as I recall,

00:05:31 ◼   ► around 1992 or so? '92? I guess I could have done some research here. But it seems very strange to

00:05:41 ◼   ► me, and sad in some ways, that here we are 25 years later, and there's nothing that easy. There are

00:05:48 ◼   ► certain things that Frontier made easy, that 25 years later, there's nothing that fills that void.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. I like to think of it as an artifact from an alternate universe. If programming

00:06:00 ◼   ► and scripting had gone another way, you know, Frontier might be, you know, one of the most

00:06:07 ◼   ► important apps on the platform, and there might be a lot of imitators. But we kind of stuck with the,

00:06:13 ◼   ► you know, here's your text file on disk, and we're reading and writing to files kind of way.

00:06:21 ◼   ► where our frontier is, you know,

00:06:23 ◼   ► I think the technical term might be image-based

00:06:26 ◼   ► because you're actually in an environment with a database

00:06:29 ◼   ► rather than separate files on disc for everything.

00:06:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:06:34 ◼   ► - There was something about,

00:06:34 ◼   ► I don't think I even appreciated at the time,

00:06:37 ◼   ► you know, the thing about the language being integrated

00:06:40 ◼   ► with the database until years later,

00:06:42 ◼   ► like you said, it's been like 20 years

00:06:44 ◼   ► and we still don't really have that.

00:06:46 ◼   ► If you want to build a web app today, for example,

00:06:49 ◼   ► You pick a language, Ruby, whatever, Python, Perl,

00:06:52 ◼   ► and then you pick like, oh, I need to get the MySQL library

00:06:56 ◼   ► in or some other database framework.

00:06:58 ◼   ► They're all still very separated.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Even on other platforms, you have core data

00:07:02 ◼   ► or something was like the official way,

00:07:04 ◼   ► love it or hate it.

00:07:05 ◼   ► That's like the official way to do database work

00:07:08 ◼   ► on the Mac or iOS, but it's still very separate.

00:07:11 ◼   ► There's no, I mean, it's not tightly integrated

00:07:13 ◼   ► in the way that Frontier was.

00:07:16 ◼   ► Right, it's like every language, I mean,

00:07:20 ◼   ► I'm sure you can go back 50, 60 years

00:07:22 ◼   ► and there's some weird language where you had to,

00:07:24 ◼   ► but every language has built in arithmetic operators.

00:07:28 ◼   ► So if you've got two integers, you

00:07:31 ◼   ► can just use the integer name variable plus the other one,

00:07:35 ◼   ► and you get the sum of the two numbers.

00:07:37 ◼   ► It would be an enormous pain in the ass

00:07:39 ◼   ► if you had to write three or four lines of code

00:07:41 ◼   ► to import arithmetic library and call

00:07:45 ◼   ► like a PLUS plus function just to add two integers.

00:07:50 ◼   ► But that's still sort of the way

00:07:51 ◼   ► that we kind of have to do file IO with everything.

00:07:54 ◼   ► And I love the Unix scripting system.

00:07:57 ◼   ► I write stuff in Perl all the time.

00:07:59 ◼   ► And there's lots of ways where that's great,

00:08:02 ◼   ► but the fact that that's kind of all we're left with today

00:08:04 ◼   ► is sort of sad.

00:08:05 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:08:07 ◼   ► Especially since every modern app,

00:08:09 ◼   ► especially web apps,

00:08:10 ◼   ► needs some kind of database persistence.

00:08:12 ◼   ► I mean, it's very rare that you have an app

00:08:14 ◼   ► that's so lightweight that it doesn't need any database or file, I/O at all.

00:08:20 ◼   ► The other thing historically that was interesting about the timing of Frontier, so Frontier

00:08:24 ◼   ► comes out in 1992 or so, early 90s, and that's before the web, and was mostly about automating

00:08:30 ◼   ► stuff on the Mac. Originally it was Mac only, eventually there was a Windows version. But

00:08:35 ◼   ► obviously the big story of the 90s was the web, and Frontier quickly shifted to becoming

00:08:44 ◼   ► a place where people would generate,

00:08:48 ◼   ► create their own, it wasn't necessarily a content management system,

00:08:52 ◼   ► but you could use it to make content management systems. And that's probably

00:08:56 ◼   ► Manton, where you really got involved with it.

00:09:00 ◼   ► It kind of, I don't think I used it before it kind of

00:09:04 ◼   ► pivoted a little bit toward the web. Because like Frontier used

00:09:08 ◼   ► to be a commercial, you know, buy the box in the store

00:09:12 ◼   ► software package and at the source there's difficulties with that because now you're

00:09:16 ◼   ► competing with AppleScript and other things as Apple, you know, HyperCard, all those kind

00:09:21 ◼   ► of scripting environments at the time.

00:09:22 ◼   ► And at some point, and Brent maybe remembers the details, but it switched to now it's open

00:09:28 ◼   ► source and there's a lot more web frameworks and kind of embracing that and trying to find,

00:09:33 ◼   ► you know, just a new set of people that can be using Frontier for web apps and for websites.

00:09:41 ◼   ► So,

00:09:45 ◼   ► we've got so many things to talk about. Let's talk about

00:09:49 ◼   ► I'll let you guys pick. Do you want to talk about micro.blog

00:09:53 ◼   ► first or do you want to talk about JSON feed first? Which one do you think makes sense to talk about first before

00:09:57 ◼   ► we talk about the other? I like JSON feed. I mean that's

00:10:01 ◼   ► we've been focused on that the last couple weeks. Let's talk about that.

00:10:05 ◼   ► Alright, so Brent, tell me what JSON feed is.

00:10:09 ◼   ► JSON feed is like RSS or Atom, but it's in JSON, and it has a few more features that

00:10:19 ◼   ► are needed these days that didn't exist in RSS and Atom.

00:10:23 ◼   ► But the main point of it, I think, is still the JSON-ness of it.

00:10:27 ◼   ► XML is something that people hate working with.

00:10:30 ◼   ► They do a lousy job of generating feeds, and everybody just prefers JSON.

00:10:35 ◼   ► So hey, let's do this in JSON.

00:10:38 ◼   ► JSON is, what's it called?

00:10:41 ◼   ► What's it stand for?

00:10:42 ◼   ► JavaScript object notation, I think.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:46 ◼   ► But basically, it's just a way of very simply defining either--

00:10:53 ◼   ► I think that the JavaScript term is dictionary.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Other languages would call it a hash,

00:10:57 ◼   ► but where you have these key value pairs, where

00:11:00 ◼   ► there's a name of the thing and then the value of the thing.

00:11:03 ◼   ► And you can have a whole list of them in an object.

00:11:07 ◼   ► and you can have arrays.

00:11:08 ◼   ► And you don't have to be a programming expert

00:11:11 ◼   ► to know what an array is.

00:11:11 ◼   ► It's just if you have an array of 10 items,

00:11:14 ◼   ► it's just a list of 10 items, and the order matters.

00:11:16 ◼   ► And it's, you can have,

00:11:20 ◼   ► what makes it a little bit more complicated than that

00:11:23 ◼   ► is that you can have a dictionary

00:11:24 ◼   ► where one of the objects of the dictionary

00:11:26 ◼   ► is another dictionary or an array,

00:11:28 ◼   ► and so it can get hierarchical and go deeper

00:11:32 ◼   ► to have nested data structures.

00:11:34 ◼   ► But basically, at a high level, that's it,

00:11:37 ◼   ► and it's very simple and you can look at it as a human

00:11:41 ◼   ► and kind of get the gist of exactly what it is

00:11:45 ◼   ► and what it means.

00:11:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not difficult to read.

00:11:49 ◼   ► And at a programming level,

00:11:50 ◼   ► it's super easy to read and write too,

00:11:53 ◼   ► which kind of covers all bases.

00:11:55 ◼   ► - Right, and one of the things that I feel like

00:11:58 ◼   ► is essential to it is that even though

00:12:00 ◼   ► it's based on JavaScript syntax

00:12:02 ◼   ► and a JavaScript implementation that reads or writes JSON

00:12:06 ◼   ► can literally just read the JSON file.

00:12:09 ◼   ► And if it's a valid JSON file, just

00:12:11 ◼   ► interpret it right through the JavaScript interpreter.

00:12:13 ◼   ► You don't have to process it in any way.

00:12:16 ◼   ► It's not specific to JavaScript.

00:12:18 ◼   ► It has been quickly adopted by every single programming

00:12:22 ◼   ► platform that is in use today.

00:12:24 ◼   ► It has built-in JSON parsers and generators.

00:12:29 ◼   ► It is, again, trivial is often a dangerous word

00:12:34 ◼   ► use in programming, but it's generally trivial in any modern programming environment to generate

00:12:41 ◼   ► or consume JSON.

00:12:44 ◼   ► Often just one line of code for either.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Yep.

00:12:48 ◼   ► Very simple.

00:12:49 ◼   ► That's not true for XML.

00:12:52 ◼   ► And obviously there are many, many very well-known and well-done XML libraries, but it is definitely

00:13:04 ◼   ► not as one line away as JSON is.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And it's proven in the-- well, when did XML first

00:13:15 ◼   ► come into being?

00:13:16 ◼   ► Probably the late '90s, right?

00:13:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:19 ◼   ► It's roughly 20 years old.

00:13:20 ◼   ► So I mean, with 20 years of experience under a belt,

00:13:23 ◼   ► we can safely say, even 20 years in,

00:13:28 ◼   ► there's an awful lot of broken XML out there.

00:13:31 ◼   ► And Brent, you can speak to that in your history

00:13:34 ◼   ► as somebody who's written a very popular feed reader,

00:13:39 ◼   ► NetNewswire, for those of you who don't remember,

00:13:41 ◼   ► was originally Brent's product,

00:13:44 ◼   ► and reads RSS feeds and Atom feeds.

00:13:47 ◼   ► And what percentage of feeds out there do you think

00:13:50 ◼   ► had some sort of XML error?

00:13:53 ◼   ► - No, I haven't thought in that terms, but it's a lot.

00:13:57 ◼   ► I mean, character encoding errors

00:14:00 ◼   ► are especially pernicious.

00:14:01 ◼   ► They appear all the time.

00:14:03 ◼   ► people are building their RSS using a template or whatever, not an actual XML writer which would

00:14:10 ◼   ► handle all of this stuff for them. And so feeds are just screwed up a thousand different ways.

00:14:16 ◼   ► It's super common. And so yeah, I was always working around those kinds of bugs.

00:14:21 ◼   ► So the chase on feed launch, you guys, the spec for it is bylined by both of you.

00:14:32 ◼   ► It's, I think, Manton Reese and Brent Simmons.

00:14:35 ◼   ► I have a cheat code, because the three of us

00:14:42 ◼   ► are on a Slack group together.

00:14:45 ◼   ► This was hashed over in advance.

00:14:47 ◼   ► So I've been aware of JSON feed far months before it was

00:14:51 ◼   ► actually announced, and I've read the spec

00:14:53 ◼   ► and gave you guys some feedback on typos and stuff like that.

00:14:59 ◼   ► But Manton, tell me, what got you interested?

00:15:01 ◼   ► because I think it was Brent's idea first, if I recall my history from this, like it was originally Brent's idea,

00:15:07 ◼   ► but Manton, you obviously jumped in far enough that you became a full on, you know, 50/50 collaborator on the spec.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I was actually thinking about this and I looked back on some of the emails and actually Brent and I exchanged a couple emails about this as far back as 2015.

00:15:25 ◼   ► There was a couple emails kind of loosely related to this.

00:15:30 ◼   ► And I thought about it because I think a lot of people

00:15:33 ◼   ► when they look at JSON feed, especially at an example JSON,

00:15:37 ◼   ► which is just so much more clear and readable and simple

00:15:40 ◼   ► than XML and RSS feeds, like you said,

00:15:45 ◼   ► I think that some people are kind of fooled into thinking

00:15:47 ◼   ► it was just like whipped together really quickly,

00:15:48 ◼   ► the spec and put out there.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And so I was kind of curious

00:15:52 ◼   ► how long we've been talking about it.

00:15:53 ◼   ► And we just briefly exchanged email way, way back.

00:15:56 ◼   ► But then in earnest at the beginning of this year,

00:15:58 ◼   ► Brent said, you know what?

00:16:00 ◼   ► The time is right.

00:16:01 ◼   ► This is a good time.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Let's talk about this.

00:16:04 ◼   ► Let's think through a spec, see what it would look like

00:16:08 ◼   ► and see if it has a place in the open web.

00:16:11 ◼   ► And I'm so glad he did because it's,

00:16:15 ◼   ► I really do think the time is right.

00:16:16 ◼   ► And a lot of the feedback we get from people is,

00:16:20 ◼   ► wow, I got an, actually I got an email yesterday

00:16:23 ◼   ► from someone said, oh, we wanted this at our company 10 years ago.

00:16:26 ◼   ► We were hoping someone would do this.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And now finally, you know, it's here.

00:16:30 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:16:30 ◼   ► Uh, I kept expecting someone to do it too.

00:16:34 ◼   ► I, you know, yeah, for 10 years at least I thought, wow, surely

00:16:38 ◼   ► this will happen at some point.

00:16:39 ◼   ► And then we realized, well, I guess we're the people to make it happen.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Well, okay, fine.

00:16:45 ◼   ► There's a, uh, of infinite, I mean, a whole bunch of XKCD comics are very

00:16:51 ◼   ► but there's one in particular and we've seen it pop up probably once a day every day since

00:16:56 ◼   ► JSON Feed comes up where somebody first sees JSON Feed and there's an XKCD comic. I will

00:17:01 ◼   ► put it in the show notes, I swear. But the gist of it is that somebody says, "Hey, there's

00:17:05 ◼   ► 14 competing standards in this space. That's a mess. This is a terrible idea. Let's come

00:17:10 ◼   ► up with a brand new universal format, a spec that'll be the one true spec." And then the

00:17:16 ◼   ► third panel is, "Now we have 15 competing specs in this space." And people think they're

00:17:21 ◼   ► being very clever when they mention this in the context of JSON feed but my

00:17:25 ◼   ► objection to it it's a funny comic I get it but my objection to it in the context

00:17:30 ◼   ► of JSON feed is that JSON feed is in no way in in if you read the spec itself if

00:17:36 ◼   ► you read what you both of you have written about it and and your interest

00:17:39 ◼   ► in it it is not meant as the let's stop using RSS and Adam and whatever else

00:17:47 ◼   ► might be obvious. It is meant to be the 15th thing in this field that addresses

00:17:52 ◼   ► new issues or does things better that the other ones can't do but isn't meant

00:17:58 ◼   ► to replace them. Is that fair? Yeah, that is fair. In fact, the spec itself has

00:18:03 ◼   ► some wording to the effect of, you know, if you can only do one kind of feed, pick

00:18:07 ◼   ► RSS because it's been around a long time, because it's good, because it's, you know,

00:18:12 ◼   ► well-tested, supported all over the place.

00:18:16 ◼   ► So we're not saying that any other format should go away

00:18:19 ◼   ► and we're not trying to be the one universal format.

00:18:21 ◼   ► It is what it is, which is a pragmatic JSON-based format.

00:18:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think that's important

00:18:30 ◼   ► because some of the feedback, the negative feedback

00:18:34 ◼   ► we've heard is that it doesn't try to solve all problems.

00:18:37 ◼   ► And some people would like it to solve more problems

00:18:40 ◼   ► and be an even more flexible and kind of advanced format.

00:18:43 ◼   ► But then that introduces complexity and other issues.

00:18:46 ◼   ► And then you're kind of back where you started in some way.

00:18:48 ◼   ► And it doesn't try to do that.

00:18:50 ◼   ► It really clear prioritizes, like I said, clarity,

00:18:54 ◼   ► just making it really simple to implement.

00:18:56 ◼   ► It doesn't try to solve everything.

00:18:58 ◼   ► So yeah, that comic is funny.

00:18:59 ◼   ► I laugh, I laugh the first few times I saw that.

00:19:02 ◼   ► I don't laugh quite as much the 10th or 15th time

00:19:07 ◼   ► I've seen someone post it,

00:19:07 ◼   ► but it's not quite accurate

00:19:10 ◼   ► and then JSON feed doesn't attempt to do everything.

00:19:14 ◼   ► It just tries to solve a few problems

00:19:16 ◼   ► and make it really clear.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And the whole idea, I mean, if we're glossing over it is,

00:19:21 ◼   ► now things are kind of stuck.

00:19:23 ◼   ► We could use kind of just a little kickstart

00:19:28 ◼   ► in the open web standards, new feed readers,

00:19:32 ◼   ► just people even just thinking and kind of talking

00:19:35 ◼   ► about web standards and feeds and feed readers,

00:19:39 ◼   ► I think is a win.

00:19:40 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah, for sure.

00:19:42 ◼   ► - I totally agree with that.

00:19:44 ◼   ► And I think in the handful of weeks

00:19:47 ◼   ► since JSON feed was announced, the uptake,

00:19:50 ◼   ► I was very optimistic about JSON feed.

00:19:53 ◼   ► There was something about it that just looking at it,

00:19:55 ◼   ► I thought I just smelled a winner.

00:19:58 ◼   ► I think when I linked to it on during Fireball,

00:19:59 ◼   ► I said something to the effect of,

00:20:01 ◼   ► I had the same feeling about it,

00:20:04 ◼   ► even though it's not my creation,

00:20:05 ◼   ► but I had that same feeling about it

00:20:06 ◼   ► that I did about Markdown back in 2002 or 2003,

00:20:10 ◼   ► whenever it was that I first released Markdown.

00:20:13 ◼   ► I just thought when you guys finished it

00:20:17 ◼   ► and it was very close to the end,

00:20:18 ◼   ► I looked at it and I'm like,

00:20:19 ◼   ► this smells like a winner to me,

00:20:21 ◼   ► because I think that if I hadn't been behind the scenes

00:20:24 ◼   ► reading this back for months beforehand,

00:20:26 ◼   ► if it had just popped into my news as a new thing,

00:20:30 ◼   ► I thought I would look at this and I would think,

00:20:32 ◼   ► oh, that's cool.

00:20:33 ◼   ► I should quick add that to Daring Fireball.

00:20:35 ◼   ► That wouldn't take much work.

00:20:36 ◼   ► And that's exactly what happened with a bunch of people

00:20:38 ◼   ► we know, like Jason Snell at Six Colors.

00:20:42 ◼   ► The day that it was announced-- he didn't know it was coming.

00:20:45 ◼   ► The day that it's announced, he's

00:20:46 ◼   ► working on adding it to Six Colors, which

00:20:50 ◼   ► still runs on movable type.

00:20:51 ◼   ► And he ran into a very small problem with JSON encoding

00:20:56 ◼   ► his strings for values.

00:20:58 ◼   ► And so I quick put together-- it's the first movable type

00:21:01 ◼   ► I've written in, I think, 15 years.

00:21:03 ◼   ► But it was very-- it's super, super small.

00:21:06 ◼   ► It is literally like-- it's way more comments than code.

00:21:09 ◼   ► It's just three or four lines of code to get--

00:21:12 ◼   ► and JSON string encoding is super simple.

00:21:15 ◼   ► There's not a lot of rules.

00:21:16 ◼   ► It's not like XML.

00:21:17 ◼   ► It's very simple.

00:21:18 ◼   ► You pretty much just need to backslash escape

00:21:21 ◼   ► your actual double quotes, because the string is

00:21:25 ◼   ► enclosed by double quotes.

00:21:27 ◼   ► So every actual double quote in your string

00:21:29 ◼   ► string needs to be encoded, and you take out

00:21:32 ◼   ► all your white space.

00:21:33 ◼   ► So if you have a tab in your character,

00:21:35 ◼   ► you just put a backslash T in, and a return is a backslash N.

00:21:40 ◼   ► And so literally, Jason Snell had a JSON feed.

00:21:43 ◼   ► He'd never heard of it.

00:21:44 ◼   ► And within two hours of hearing about it,

00:21:46 ◼   ► and a little bit of work for me, he had a working JSON feed

00:21:50 ◼   ► on his site.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Manton, you helped create a WordPress plugin

00:21:56 ◼   ► that was there on day one.

00:21:57 ◼   ► And all, I mean, I lost count,

00:21:59 ◼   ► I very quickly lost count of how many sites had JSON feeds

00:22:03 ◼   ► within 24 hours of the announcement.

00:22:05 ◼   ► And I thought that was pretty cool.

00:22:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, this response has been incredible.

00:22:10 ◼   ► And you're right about the like the encoding issues

00:22:13 ◼   ► and just the simplicity.

00:22:14 ◼   ► I mean, one of the problems with XML is that

00:22:17 ◼   ► it's hard to put HTML inside XML

00:22:19 ◼   ► because they're the same, right?

00:22:21 ◼   ► And so you have to escape everything

00:22:24 ◼   ► and that's really easy to get wrong.

00:22:26 ◼   ► And if you just pull up a default RSS feed from a website,

00:22:31 ◼   ► it's a little bit of a disaster.

00:22:33 ◼   ► I mean, it's a mix of a lot of things.

00:22:35 ◼   ► There's some RSS, there's some Adam in there sometimes,

00:22:38 ◼   ► and there's at least two or three ways

00:22:40 ◼   ► to put HTML in a feed.

00:22:43 ◼   ► And with JSON, it's just way simpler.

00:22:46 ◼   ► We have content_html field,

00:22:50 ◼   ► you put HTML in it and everything's good.

00:22:54 ◼   ► - So I think the original sin is XML itself.

00:22:59 ◼   ► I think XML, and this is, in some ways,

00:23:03 ◼   ► it's gonna be controversial, maybe,

00:23:05 ◼   ► but I think it was a disaster for our entire industry.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I think basically, this is my theory of what happened,

00:23:12 ◼   ► is that the web became such a sensational,

00:23:17 ◼   ► explosive success where like 1994, nobody had heard of it.

00:23:23 ◼   ► 1995 technical people had heard of it,

00:23:26 ◼   ► and by 1996 everybody was on the web.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And it's crazy.

00:23:31 ◼   ► Microsoft famously, Bill Gates wrote this memo

00:23:35 ◼   ► that was like, we're currently at mid-90s,

00:23:39 ◼   ► the most successful company in the history of the world,

00:23:41 ◼   ► and we're completely shifting our entire,

00:23:43 ◼   ► everything we do is entirely focused on the internet

00:23:45 ◼   ► all of a sudden.

00:23:46 ◼   ► We totally missed this and we're shifting

00:23:48 ◼   ► the biggest company in the world to be internet focused.

00:23:50 ◼   ► And it worked for them, right?

00:23:51 ◼   ► It was the right move.

00:23:54 ◼   ► And I feel like everybody was so obsessed with the web, and the web is all based on

00:23:59 ◼   ► HTML, and they were like, "Well, now let's do everything like HTML, and let's make a

00:24:06 ◼   ► data serialization format that is like HTML, where you've got these tags that are set by

00:24:11 ◼   ► angle brackets that enclose whatever it is they represent, and then you end them with

00:24:18 ◼   ► the same type of tag."

00:24:19 ◼   ► And like you said, Ben, XML and HTML pretty much are the same basic idea.

00:24:24 ◼   ► There was the whole disaster that we went through where they literally—we spent like

00:24:28 ◼   ► 10 years of standards process trying to get HTML to become XHTML, which was the bastard

00:24:36 ◼   ► baby of XML and HTML.

00:24:39 ◼   ► And which eventually—

00:24:40 ◼   ► And that failed, thank goodness.

00:24:42 ◼   ► Right, it failed.

00:24:46 ◼   ► And HTML5, which is what we have wound up with,

00:24:49 ◼   ► which is much better, pretty much went completely

00:24:52 ◼   ► around that XHTML standards process.

00:24:56 ◼   ► But it's exactly like you said.

00:24:58 ◼   ► In some ways, it's such a bad idea,

00:24:59 ◼   ► because it's like you've got XML,

00:25:02 ◼   ► and it's got the same rules as HTML.

00:25:04 ◼   ► But a lot of what you want to encode,

00:25:06 ◼   ► whether it's in feeds or any other use of XML,

00:25:11 ◼   ► if you're using an XML data format,

00:25:13 ◼   ► if your content is HTML, it's a disaster.

00:25:18 ◼   ► It really is.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And it looks, it's almost impossible for a human

00:25:21 ◼   ► to look at it and see if it looks right.

00:25:25 ◼   ► - Yep, and even writing software for it.

00:25:29 ◼   ► I mean, I think my code works properly

00:25:32 ◼   ► for all those different kinds of feeds,

00:25:34 ◼   ► but there's so many like decode this and then decode this,

00:25:37 ◼   ► and it's just much more complicated than it needs to be.

00:25:40 ◼   ► There's so many places you can get it wrong.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and then, you know, you may have it right in your code, but there's going to be feeds or

00:25:48 ◼   ► documents, whatever they're, that are going to have it wrong on their end. And then your users

00:25:54 ◼   ► are going to notice and report it as a bug. And pretty soon you're writing, you know, workarounds

00:25:58 ◼   ► to handle buggy, you know, documents and feeds and so on. And it gets messy. I think, I think

00:26:07 ◼   ► the central theme of a lot of this is idealism versus practicality. Is that the opposite of

00:26:15 ◼   ► idealism? What's a good word for that, Brent? Pragmatism. Pragmatism is a good word.

00:26:22 ◼   ► And so XML is a very idealistic format, in my opinion, because it is literally, it stands for

00:26:34 ◼   ► for extensible markup language, I believe,

00:26:37 ◼   ► but it is extensible.

00:26:40 ◼   ► It can and is, in the real world,

00:26:42 ◼   ► being used for just about anything you could imagine.

00:26:46 ◼   ► But it's so complicated because it's so ambitious

00:26:50 ◼   ► and because it aimed to be able to represent or to model just

00:26:53 ◼   ► about anything you could throw at it.

00:26:57 ◼   ► And so people say, like in your announcement--

00:26:59 ◼   ► and I read the whole Hacker News thread on it.

00:27:02 ◼   ► I know you guys--

00:27:03 ◼   ► Wow.

00:27:04 ◼   ► You guys did not.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Thanks for doing that, Fred.

00:27:07 ◼   ► If it was my thing, I would not have been able to do it.

00:27:10 ◼   ► Like, if it was my baby, if JSON feed were my baby,

00:27:13 ◼   ► I would not have read the Hacker News feed.

00:27:15 ◼   ► Or I would have read the first two lines

00:27:17 ◼   ► and then closed the tab.

00:27:18 ◼   ► I imagine 100 links to that same XKCD comic.

00:27:22 ◼   ► I think it came up at least three times.

00:27:24 ◼   ► And it was one of the deeper threads,

00:27:26 ◼   ► because the first one who did it, I swear,

00:27:28 ◼   ► it's a really deep thread with all the people who are like,

00:27:31 ◼   ► Damn it, I was just about to post that.

00:27:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:35 ◼   ► But one of the bits of pushback on this would be,

00:27:41 ◼   ► and I've seen this repeated several times, I'll paraphrase,

00:27:44 ◼   ► which is you guys are presenting JSON feed as easier

00:27:49 ◼   ► and less error prone to generate and parse than XML.

00:27:54 ◼   ► And people are saying, the response is,

00:27:56 ◼   ► if you're having problems parsing and generating XML,

00:28:01 ◼   ► the solution isn't to create another format in a different language. How about you fix your XML

00:28:05 ◼   ► generators and parsers? So XML, you know, it was early enough when XML came out that

00:28:12 ◼   ► people didn't really know how developers would behave in as a giant mass. And the fact is,

00:28:21 ◼   ► they're just not going to always behave all that well because people are, you know, they have

00:28:25 ◼   ► budgets, they have deadlines, they have different skill levels. So people aren't necessarily going

00:28:32 ◼   ► to do the right thing. So it's important to keep that in mind and use formats that are

00:28:40 ◼   ► a whole lot easier so that the burden isn't on each individual developer.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Right. And that the fact is, this isn't going to like that question, like, why don't you just fix,

00:28:52 ◼   ► X, it's not gonna change.

00:28:54 ◼   ► I mean, even if you think back,

00:28:56 ◼   ► like we were talking about Brent working on that newswire,

00:28:58 ◼   ► it's been a number of years

00:28:59 ◼   ► since Brent worked on that newswire.

00:29:01 ◼   ► Guess how much has changed since then with RSS feeds?

00:29:04 ◼   ► Nothing, nothing's changed.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Nothing has changed with feed parsing and tools.

00:29:10 ◼   ► It's basically same thing.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And so I think that would continue.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Nothing would change without someone

00:29:17 ◼   ► kind of putting something new out there

00:29:19 ◼   ► and getting people to talk about it.

00:29:21 ◼   ► - XML is old enough.

00:29:24 ◼   ► In fact, I think it's long past old enough,

00:29:26 ◼   ► and I think it speaks to you guys saying

00:29:27 ◼   ► that you kind of expected something like JSON feed

00:29:29 ◼   ► to appear 10 years ago.

00:29:31 ◼   ► And in hindsight, it does.

00:29:33 ◼   ► It feels like a real head scratcher that it didn't.

00:29:35 ◼   ► I would say by 10 years ago, XML was settled enough

00:29:40 ◼   ► that we can see how it's used in the real world,

00:29:42 ◼   ► and in the real world, it's often broken.

00:29:45 ◼   ► And that's just a statement of fact.

00:29:47 ◼   ► And you can say it shouldn't be.

00:29:50 ◼   ► You can say that all these people generating malformed XML

00:29:54 ◼   ► or subtly malformed or questionable XML,

00:29:56 ◼   ► that they should fix their tool chain.

00:29:59 ◼   ► I guess that's correct.

00:30:02 ◼   ► There's all sorts of things the world should do though.

00:30:03 ◼   ► We should all exercise every day.

00:30:05 ◼   ► We should stop drinking beer.

00:30:09 ◼   ► There's all sorts of things that we could do

00:30:10 ◼   ► that should be better,

00:30:12 ◼   ► but that don't reflect the way people actually behave.

00:30:15 ◼   ► - In fact, it's because of XML

00:30:18 ◼   ► that I don't exercise enough and drink too much beer.

00:30:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:30:22 ◼   ► - Here's my favorite anecdote.

00:30:25 ◼   ► I keep, maybe, but hopefully, in fact, I guarantee it,

00:30:28 ◼   ► by the time this podcast airs,

00:30:30 ◼   ► this will be a post on Daring Fireball,

00:30:32 ◼   ► is, in terms of it being easier to generate.

00:30:37 ◼   ► And again, I think that there are people who,

00:30:42 ◼   ► if you're already comfortable with your RSS

00:30:47 ◼   ► an atom parsing.

00:30:49 ◼   ► You're responsible for some product or service

00:30:51 ◼   ► that consumes RSS feeds.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And you have a working system that consumes these feeds.

00:30:56 ◼   ► And you look at JSON feed.

00:30:58 ◼   ► I'm not saying you YouTube,

00:30:59 ◼   ► but you, this hypothetical person who wishes there weren't

00:31:02 ◼   ► another new standard.

00:31:03 ◼   ► You say, well, now you've just given me more work to do

00:31:05 ◼   ► because I have to add support for this new thing

00:31:07 ◼   ► and I already had this thing working.

00:31:09 ◼   ► And it's not that hard to consume XML,

00:31:14 ◼   ► that you should be able to do it.

00:31:16 ◼   ► I disagree, and I think it depends on which platform you're using, but the real eye-opener

00:31:21 ◼   ► for me was Workflow, which is the iOS automation system.

00:31:27 ◼   ► It's sort of like Automator for iOS, and it was actually recently acquired by Apple with

00:31:34 ◼   ► a lot of publicity.

00:31:36 ◼   ► It's a totally different discussion as to whether Apple's going to keep it going as

00:31:39 ◼   ► an actively developed product or integrate it into iOS somehow or what they're going

00:31:43 ◼   ► to do.

00:31:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:31:45 ◼   ► now, it's still in the App Store. It was not like, "Hey, we got acquired by Apple and

00:31:50 ◼   ► now it's left out to die." They've actually had a couple of updates since the acquisition.

00:31:55 ◼   ► And basically what you can do with Workflow is you create these—they call them workflows—and

00:32:02 ◼   ► you drag actions. It's a visual way of programming. And maybe there's Workflow users who don't

00:32:06 ◼   ► think of it as programming, but it is. It's a visual way, though. And you drag these things

00:32:10 ◼   ► like an action would be get URL, and you give it a URL,

00:32:16 ◼   ► and when it runs, it'll go out on the web

00:32:19 ◼   ► and get the content of whatever that URL is.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And then you drag an action beneath it,

00:32:25 ◼   ► and it can do something with it.

00:32:28 ◼   ► So here, like a stupid example would be you could get a URL,

00:32:32 ◼   ► and it, say, returns text.

00:32:35 ◼   ► And it's just plain text.

00:32:36 ◼   ► And then you could have an action underneath it

00:32:38 ◼   ► that says reverse the text.

00:32:40 ◼   ► And it would turn Brent into-- how do you reverse Brent?

00:32:44 ◼   ► I'm terrible at this.

00:32:45 ◼   ► This is a terrible example.

00:32:46 ◼   ► T--

00:32:47 ◼   ► Tnerb.

00:32:47 ◼   ► T-N-E-R-B, Tnerb.

00:32:50 ◼   ► And maybe there's an action to speak the text.

00:32:52 ◼   ► So you could have three things in a row, get a URL,

00:32:54 ◼   ► and it returns a string, reverse the string,

00:32:57 ◼   ► and then speak it aloud through your iPhone or iPad speakers.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And you haven't written a line of code.

00:33:03 ◼   ► You've dragged these three things out.

00:33:06 ◼   ► You string them in order.

00:33:07 ◼   ► and the results of each one get passed down the chain.

00:33:12 ◼   ► And there's other systems.

00:33:14 ◼   ► Automator works the same way.

00:33:16 ◼   ► But workflow has proved to be quite popular with the iOS

00:33:21 ◼   ► enthusiasts set.

00:33:23 ◼   ► And it works around certain shortcomings, in my opinion,

00:33:26 ◼   ► on the platform, like the fact that there is no scripting

00:33:29 ◼   ► system on iOS like there is on Mac OS.

00:33:33 ◼   ► And anyway, where this ties into JSON feed

00:33:36 ◼   ► is Federico Vitici of MacStories,

00:33:40 ◼   ► and arguably the most well-known workflow user in the world.

00:33:45 ◼   ► He's a serious iOS productivity enthusiast.

00:33:47 ◼   ► He writes all sorts of very interesting stuff in workflow

00:33:52 ◼   ► to aid his productivity.

00:33:54 ◼   ► He showed an example with JSON feed on Twitter,

00:33:57 ◼   ► and it blew my mind how simple it was, because more or less,

00:34:00 ◼   ► he just passed in the URL to Daring Fireball's JSON feed.

00:34:03 ◼   ► And then the next step in JSON was

00:34:06 ◼   ► turn that feed into a dictionary, which

00:34:09 ◼   ► is a workflow data structure, which is named values with--

00:34:15 ◼   ► or keys that have the title of the feed, the date of the item,

00:34:21 ◼   ► and then a value for each thing.

00:34:24 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden, in the next step,

00:34:25 ◼   ► he can just extract the value from the dictionary value.

00:34:31 ◼   ► So give it a JSON feed, turn it into a workflow dictionary,

00:34:34 ◼   ► which is something he's familiar with

00:34:36 ◼   ► and is intrinsic to workflow.

00:34:38 ◼   ► And then he can do things.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Like all of a sudden, he could show

00:34:41 ◼   ► a list of all 25 items in the Daring Fireball JSON feed.

00:34:46 ◼   ► So workflow wasn't updated to support JSON feed.

00:34:50 ◼   ► It just naturally works with JSON, period,

00:34:54 ◼   ► and maps JSON to what workflow calls a dictionary.

00:34:58 ◼   ► And so Federico wrote a thing,

00:35:01 ◼   ► like within a day or two of JSON feed being announced,

00:35:04 ◼   ► where he could do something

00:35:05 ◼   ► that was actually useful from workflow.

00:35:09 ◼   ► And then I looked into it.

00:35:10 ◼   ► Now I'm not a heavy workflow user,

00:35:11 ◼   ► but I looked into it, I opened workflow,

00:35:13 ◼   ► and I replicated what he did.

00:35:15 ◼   ► And I built a little workflow for me,

00:35:16 ◼   ► which I actually might use.

00:35:18 ◼   ► It's a little thing I can launch

00:35:19 ◼   ► from my iPhone home screen now.

00:35:21 ◼   ► It shows a list of all my recent articles

00:35:22 ◼   ► at Daring Fireball, and I can copy the URL for one.

00:35:25 ◼   ► So if I'm texting somebody,

00:35:26 ◼   ► And I know I want to text them a recent article I wrote.

00:35:29 ◼   ► I can do this now with like three taps on my iPhone.

00:35:33 ◼   ► But the thing I looked into is, well,

00:35:34 ◼   ► could I do this with RSS or Atom in workflow?

00:35:38 ◼   ► And the answer is no.

00:35:39 ◼   ► There's no way to do it.

00:35:41 ◼   ► So it's not just is it easier or harder

00:35:45 ◼   ► to parse JSON versus RSS.

00:35:48 ◼   ► For workflow users, it's literally

00:35:50 ◼   ► the difference between it's possible and not possible.

00:35:55 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a great example of like new tools, right, that we hope will happen because of this.

00:36:00 ◼   ► It wasn't possible to do that before.

00:36:01 ◼   ► And maybe you could have some custom workflow RSS thing that was built in that the workflow team worked on.

00:36:09 ◼   ► But you can't just have a generic XML action that would work this way.

00:36:15 ◼   ► And it gets back to the point earlier about like, in a lot of cases, parsing JSON is just one line of code.

00:36:22 ◼   ► it can't be one line of code for XML because XML is more complicated. You don't have just one, you know, key.

00:36:27 ◼   ► If you're working on a dictionary, you have attributes. It's just, it's a different type of format.

00:36:32 ◼   ► You can't have the same simplicity with XML. It's just, it's literally not possible to do the same thing and just make a dictionary out of it.

00:36:40 ◼   ► I just think that there are people who think, if you think XML is simple enough that there's not a need for this,

00:36:45 ◼   ► I really think that you're overlooking just how dramatically simpler JSON is for a lot

00:36:53 ◼   ► of modern programming platforms.

00:36:57 ◼   ► I think of it as being more democratic, right?

00:36:59 ◼   ► So JSON is just usable everywhere and usable by people at massively varying skill levels.

00:37:08 ◼   ► That it makes things like working with feeds something amateurs of all kinds can totally

00:37:13 ◼   ► do and get some value out of. And I think that it sounds small, it sounds small in the way I talked

00:37:20 ◼   ► about Frontier, you know, persistence is so easy. You might think, oh, well, whatever, that's a solved

00:37:25 ◼   ► problem for me. But it really does make a huge difference when you get to use the thing.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Pete: It is literally why I started by talking about Frontier, that I see a path from there to

00:37:37 ◼   ► here that is similar. And democratization of this is exactly—it's something that

00:37:45 ◼   ► I get fired up about. I really do think that when you make stuff like this easier for more

00:37:49 ◼   ► people to do—like, there was an idea in the early days of personal computing where

00:37:55 ◼   ► maybe everybody would be a programmer. And I think HyperCard was sort of designed in

00:38:00 ◼   ► that vein of, this is the sort of thing that everybody could do. And because those of us

00:38:06 ◼   ► who can program at some level, you know, like if you can write some kind of script at some

00:38:11 ◼   ► level versus, whether you, maybe you can't write a full-fledged, you know, CoCo application

00:38:16 ◼   ► that is too far beyond your capabilities as a programmer. But if you can program at all,

00:38:22 ◼   ► you could see that, and you can see how exciting it was in the '80s and '90s when we were

00:38:25 ◼   ► writing little scripts in HyperCard. You wanted that enthusiasm to spread to everybody. But

00:38:30 ◼   ► the truth is, everybody isn't a programmer. In the same way that, in theory, everybody

00:38:35 ◼   ► could write novels, but most people don't write novels. And everybody could sing, but

00:38:41 ◼   ► not everybody sings or plays a musical instrument. I think programming is very much like any

00:38:46 ◼   ► of those things, where some people have a knack for it and an interest and some people

00:38:50 ◼   ► don't. But I still think that there's a huge—I feel like we gave up as an industry

00:38:55 ◼   ► on making things approachable to more people at a simpler level. And JSON Feed is—

00:39:04 ◼   ► Right. JSON feed is exactly like that. And one of the things too is it's not just about making

00:39:09 ◼   ► feed readers, right? There's all sorts of things that you can do with a feed and the data from a

00:39:14 ◼   ► feed that just might not occur to you until all of a sudden you're like, "Whoa, I wish I could

00:39:18 ◼   ► just pick a list of recent articles from during Fireball and just copy the URL."

00:39:22 ◼   ► Sure. I think if this, then that is an example. Yes.

00:39:30 ◼   ► They have like a feed actions, things you can do, and people use that.

00:39:34 ◼   ► And it would be nice to make that kind of ease of use available in more different places,

00:39:41 ◼   ► many more places.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Right. Right. And I think as JSON feed takes root and blossoms, we'll see things like that,

00:39:49 ◼   ► where people who might be IFTTT—I don't know how you pronounce it. Do you say IFTTT or—

00:39:54 ◼   ► If—I don't know.

00:39:56 ◼   ► - No, if it's just, people might make their own feed

00:40:01 ◼   ► for things that you don't think of.

00:40:04 ◼   ► Something to do with your home

00:40:07 ◼   ► and just the smart home automation stuff

00:40:10 ◼   ► and maybe you start making a feed

00:40:11 ◼   ► of times your refrigerator's opened or whatever.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I don't know, but there's all sorts of things

00:40:17 ◼   ► that you could do with it

00:40:18 ◼   ► and with an easy to generate format,

00:40:21 ◼   ► it just opens the door to things

00:40:24 ◼   ► that you haven't thought of yet.

00:40:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

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00:42:32 ◼   ► All right, JSON Feed.

00:42:34 ◼   ► Anything else we want to talk about on JSON Feed?

00:42:37 ◼   ► Where do we think it's going?

00:42:39 ◼   ► Do you think it's, is the success about where you expected,

00:42:45 ◼   ► about what you hoped, more or less?

00:42:47 ◼   ► Jared: It's more than I thought, actually. Yeah. It almost seemed to me like people had been

00:42:53 ◼   ► sitting around not knowing if anybody else cared about this stuff, and then when we came out with

00:42:58 ◼   ► this, a whole bunch of people were like, "Oh, a lot of people care about this stuff." This stuff

00:43:03 ◼   ► being, you know, the open web and feeds and things like that. In a weird way, it's kind of like a

00:43:08 ◼   ► group is finding each other, which is really cool. Pete: Yeah. I kind of see that too. And

00:43:15 ◼   ► And it would be interesting--

00:43:21 ◼   ► we can parlay this into our next conversation

00:43:23 ◼   ► about feed reading.

00:43:24 ◼   ► And I'm curious, as feed readers now start to adopt JSON feed,

00:43:29 ◼   ► I'm curious what they will do when--

00:43:33 ◼   ► let's say somebody is using a feed reader

00:43:35 ◼   ► and they want to subscribe to Daring Fireball.

00:43:37 ◼   ► And they just-- they say-- it says new feed.

00:43:39 ◼   ► And you type in daringfireball.net.

00:43:42 ◼   ► And on the back end, both of my feeds are discoverable.

00:43:46 ◼   ► There's an RSS feed, is that technically an Atom feed,

00:43:49 ◼   ► but for the sake of, we'll just call it RSS for clarity.

00:43:53 ◼   ► There's an RSS feed and there's a JSON feed.

00:43:55 ◼   ► At what point do you think feed readers

00:43:57 ◼   ► might start preferring the JSON feed?

00:44:00 ◼   ► - I think many will, yeah, it's hard to know,

00:44:05 ◼   ► but I think some might soon because there's,

00:44:09 ◼   ► It kind of switches the code path in your app to something that's simpler,

00:44:13 ◼   ► maybe even faster in some cases.

00:44:17 ◼   ► It's hard to know. And the other thing to think about is it's not, we don't

00:44:21 ◼   ► expect everything to change overnight, but you have to start somewhere.

00:44:25 ◼   ► And so I agree with Brent, I think this is more than I thought

00:44:29 ◼   ► we'd see in the first week or two. And it gives me a lot of hope that

00:44:33 ◼   ► you fast forward not just weeks or months, but like

00:44:37 ◼   ► five years, 10 years, I mean, things change over years.

00:44:41 ◼   ► And starting now, which we didn't start earlier,

00:44:44 ◼   ► but starting now works too.

00:44:46 ◼   ► - Brent, what do you think?

00:44:50 ◼   ► - You know, it looks like Feedbin, for instance,

00:44:54 ◼   ► may already be preferring JSON feed

00:44:56 ◼   ► or certainly seems to be leaning that direction,

00:45:00 ◼   ► where others like Feedly aren't even sure yet

00:45:02 ◼   ► that they want to support it.

00:45:04 ◼   ► So I don't really know how long it's gonna take

00:45:08 ◼   ► feed readers in general to prefer that or, you know,

00:45:12 ◼   ► we'll see, a lot, yeah, a lot can happen in five years.

00:45:16 ◼   ► You know, and it may be that there's some other

00:45:18 ◼   ► syndication format in five years that just blows

00:45:20 ◼   ► all this away and whatever, you know, who knows?

00:45:25 ◼   ► Hard to predict, but I think, you know,

00:45:27 ◼   ► JSON feed will do well and will make the ecosystem better.

00:45:32 ◼   ► - It just loaded the feed bin.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Feedbin is an online feed reader.

00:45:38 ◼   ► And it's so funny.

00:45:41 ◼   ► I don't use it, so I don't have any feeds in mind.

00:45:43 ◼   ► But it's a very nice little iCloud.com style web app

00:45:49 ◼   ► that looks sort of like a little bit like a native app.

00:45:52 ◼   ► And because I have nothing there in the content column,

00:45:55 ◼   ► they just show an outline of a hamburger.

00:45:58 ◼   ► Like a real hamburger, not a hamburger menu.

00:46:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:46:02 ◼   ► - Making me happy.

00:46:03 ◼   ► All right, we'll speak--

00:46:04 ◼   ► - And the nice thing about some of those,

00:46:05 ◼   ► like Feedbin is also like a RSS syncing,

00:46:08 ◼   ► - Right.

00:46:09 ◼   ► - You know, feed syncing thing.

00:46:10 ◼   ► So there's lots of native apps that support Feedbin

00:46:14 ◼   ► that don't even really need to add direct support

00:46:17 ◼   ► to JSON feed necessarily, and they'll get,

00:46:20 ◼   ► they'll be, you know, quote unquote compatible.

00:46:22 ◼   ► And I think the other unknown is how much innovation

00:46:26 ◼   ► this will spark.

00:46:27 ◼   ► You know, we have like extensions in JSON feed,

00:46:29 ◼   ► people coming up with new ideas, things they want feeds to do.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And I'm hopeful about that because we haven't, I mean, when Google Reader shut down, that

00:46:37 ◼   ► was kind of like good news, bad news.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And the good news was that it did spark kind of some innovation and like more feed syncing

00:46:44 ◼   ► engines and services.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And we haven't seen much like that, but I'm hopeful that we might see something else like

00:46:50 ◼   ► that.

00:46:51 ◼   ► Like some feed reader will take a leap and say, "I'm going to add a new feature."

00:46:54 ◼   ► Imagine that.

00:46:55 ◼   ► and I'm gonna add a new feature to a feed reader

00:46:58 ◼   ► that no one has seen before.

00:46:59 ◼   ► And so we'll see.

00:47:00 ◼   ► - It sometimes seems to me like things now

00:47:04 ◼   ► are a little calcified,

00:47:06 ◼   ► like the bones of the web have hardened.

00:47:09 ◼   ► And in order to do something new, like JSON feed

00:47:14 ◼   ► or add new features to a feed reader, whatever,

00:47:17 ◼   ► like you have to go through a bunch of hurdles

00:47:19 ◼   ► and pass gatekeepers and have all these people explaining

00:47:23 ◼   ► why you're doing it wrong.

00:47:24 ◼   ► And, you know, years ago, we would just make things and people would like them or not.

00:47:30 ◼   ► And it was fun. And so, part of the message here is like, look, we can have fun and we don't actually

00:47:37 ◼   ► have to, we don't have to listen to all the gatekeepers, all the people who would stop us

00:47:42 ◼   ► from doing things. Now, it could be that what we're doing isn't the right thing or has a bunch

00:47:47 ◼   ► of flaws, you know, maybe, maybe not. But the point is, you know, let's get back to the place

00:47:53 ◼   ► where we actually do make new things and have a good time doing it.

00:47:57 ◼   ► It is fun, and I've written that too, that to me this whole thing with JSON feed is fun.

00:48:02 ◼   ► And of course that hopelessly brands me as a nerd that I think that a new JSON-based syndication feed

00:48:08 ◼   ► is fun. But it is, I have to admit, I've had a bit of a thrill just watching this thing take off over

00:48:16 ◼   ► the last week or two. And it is fun. It was fun for me to write the little script that makes the

00:48:23 ◼   ► JSON feed for Daring Fireball. It was a fun programming project for me in the way that I enjoy

00:48:32 ◼   ► little things that you can complete in the afternoon programming projects. It was very fun.

00:48:40 ◼   ► I think Dr. Drang wrote a post about creating one for his website at Lean Crew.

00:48:47 ◼   ► He more or less said the same thing. As a little scratch and itch,

00:48:53 ◼   ► do it in an afternoon programming project. It was as-built on the tin, this is an easy thing to do.

00:49:06 ◼   ► Ironically, I think of all of us who worked on the spec, I was the last one to actually

00:49:10 ◼   ► write code to generate a feed, like the day before we published. I remember it would be easy, so,

00:49:17 ◼   ► you know, whatever. Yeah. It's funny though, because that is true. I can vouch for that.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And I remember it was like, we were like, you were like, here's a checklist of things that need to be

00:49:28 ◼   ► done before we announced this publicly. And one of them was have an actual JSON feed for Inessential.

00:49:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, and for the JSON feed site itself,

00:49:37 ◼   ► which both use the same content management system,

00:49:40 ◼   ► which is really one big, hairy Ruby script.

00:49:43 ◼   ► - Right.

00:49:44 ◼   ► I don't want to keep hammering on XML,

00:49:46 ◼   ► but I will say, though, that,

00:49:48 ◼   ► not that it's hard to make an RSS feed for a site

00:49:51 ◼   ► if you're writing your own, doing it on your own

00:49:54 ◼   ► as opposed to using WordPress or something,

00:49:56 ◼   ► but I can verify firsthand that with the weird system

00:50:00 ◼   ► I have behind the scenes at Daring Fireball,

00:50:01 ◼   ► where I take, long story short,

00:50:04 ◼   ► the system at Daring Fireball,

00:50:07 ◼   ► my short entries are a different blog behind the scenes

00:50:10 ◼   ► than my longer entries.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And then to just have one feed,

00:50:13 ◼   ► I have a script that takes two separate feeds,

00:50:16 ◼   ► one from my link list entries, one from my articles,

00:50:18 ◼   ► and blends them together into one feed.

00:50:21 ◼   ► And I wrote that myself.

00:50:23 ◼   ► And I have had times in the past 10, 15 years

00:50:28 ◼   ► where that's broken, like when I've upgraded

00:50:30 ◼   ► of the server and move to a new server where text starts getting encoded differently because there's

00:50:35 ◼   ► different modules. It's not trivial. You wouldn't want to save generating an XML feed for the last

00:50:42 ◼   ► minute. Whereas JSON feed, I could see why you weren't worried about it. And you're a big believer

00:50:49 ◼   ► in Murphy's Law, right, Brent? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, because it's true.

00:50:55 ◼   ► But Murphy's Law often involves XML. All right, speaking of feed readers, Brent, you have an

00:51:03 ◼   ► announcement to make. Yeah, I've actually been working on a new feed reader for quite some time

00:51:09 ◼   ► as one of my nights and weekends project. And I thought for quite a long time, you know, what I

00:51:15 ◼   ► wanted to do with it. And for a long time, I thought, I'll make it, you know, a for-pay

00:51:19 ◼   ► commercial thing, you know, make some money. I've decided against that. So the name of the reader is

00:51:24 ◼   ► Evergreen. And it is up on GitHub, there's a repository, github.com/brentsimmons/evergreen.

00:51:34 ◼   ► And it's not quite usable yet, except by extreme masochists. But it's coming along. And eventually,

00:51:41 ◼   ► we will have a modern nice cool Mac, RSS reader, and Adam reader and JSON feed reader.

00:51:49 ◼   ► I was gonna say is it going to support JSON feed?

00:51:52 ◼   ► Of course, yeah. But tellingly, I haven't actually written the JSON feed support for it yet, so

00:51:57 ◼   ► at the moment it's only running on my machine and it only works with RSS and Atom.

00:52:03 ◼   ► But you know, maybe I have 15 minutes later today and I'll fix that.

00:52:06 ◼   ► So it's Mac only?

00:52:10 ◼   ► Open source.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Open source.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And tell me why it's Mac only.

00:52:19 ◼   ► It's Mac only, mainly because my two big passions in my career have been the open web and the

00:52:29 ◼   ► Macintosh desktop, Mac apps. iOS apps were kind of fun, but also so massively heartbreaking that

00:52:35 ◼   ► I can't love that the way I love the Mac. And so for me, the intersection of the open web and the

00:52:42 ◼   ► Mac desktop is my favorite place to work. And that's why I work on things like Frontier,

00:52:46 ◼   ► and that's why I've worked on RSS readers. That's why I started Mars Edit a long, long time ago.

00:52:52 ◼   ► So that's my favorite place. And so I'm writing another feed reader because I,

00:52:58 ◼   ► you know, that's me. That's what I do.

00:53:00 ◼   ► So right now, your day job, though, for the last what, like, how long have you been at OmniGroup?

00:53:05 ◼   ► Two years?

00:53:06 ◼   ► Two and a half years.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Two and a half years. What do you work on at OmniGroup?

00:53:09 ◼   ► For the past year and a half, maybe I've been on OmniOutliner. And I also love Outliners.

00:53:16 ◼   ► and this is my favorite Omni app,

00:53:19 ◼   ► so it's been great working on that.

00:53:21 ◼   ► And I've been solely on the Mac version this whole time,

00:53:24 ◼   ► at least so far.

00:53:26 ◼   ► Before that, I worked on OmniFocus for Mac.

00:53:28 ◼   ► - Right, but Mac apps in particular.

00:53:31 ◼   ► - Absolutely, yeah.

00:53:32 ◼   ► - And we've had this discussion now,

00:53:34 ◼   ► obviously, long-time listeners of the show know

00:53:36 ◼   ► that you and I, along with Dave Whiskus,

00:53:38 ◼   ► collaborated on an iOS app,

00:53:43 ◼   ► ultimately it was only an iOS app,

00:53:45 ◼   ► although we had plans for a Mac app,

00:53:46 ◼   ► we can go over that some other day,

00:53:48 ◼   ► Vesper from a couple of years ago.

00:53:51 ◼   ► And in our postmortems of Vesper,

00:53:57 ◼   ► one of our big regrets was that we strategically,

00:54:01 ◼   ► I think I'm speaking for both of us,

00:54:02 ◼   ► but we wished that we had done the Mac version first,

00:54:06 ◼   ► both for business reasons and it just seems

00:54:11 ◼   ► like it was a strategic error.

00:54:14 ◼   ► I think we kind of got blindsided, or blinded by the--

00:54:19 ◼   ► sort of like what I said about how the web was--

00:54:24 ◼   ► everybody was blinded by HTML and the web in the mid '90s.

00:54:27 ◼   ► Five, six years ago, iPhone apps were such the thing.

00:54:32 ◼   ► And I don't think you ever enjoyed writing an iPhone app

00:54:36 ◼   ► as much as you enjoyed making a Mac app.

00:54:39 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really-- it's no comparison.

00:54:42 ◼   ► even in the early days of iOS.

00:54:43 ◼   ► And I had NetNewswire for iOS,

00:54:46 ◼   ► well, for iPhone was up on day one of the app store.

00:54:49 ◼   ► And that was cool initially

00:54:52 ◼   ► 'cause the iPhones were so new and exciting,

00:54:54 ◼   ► but they kind of wore off for me.

00:54:57 ◼   ► I've been a long, long time Mac user

00:54:59 ◼   ► and I love writing Mac apps, just way much more.

00:55:04 ◼   ► - It's a different, you often hear the,

00:55:08 ◼   ► I think there's more people out there,

00:55:10 ◼   ► like let's say WWDC in a few weeks,

00:55:13 ◼   ► there will be more people attending WWDC

00:55:17 ◼   ► who would raise their hand and say that they prefer iOS,

00:55:20 ◼   ► writing iOS apps to writing Mac apps.

00:55:23 ◼   ► And again, not to go out in the weeds

00:55:25 ◼   ► on programming differences,

00:55:26 ◼   ► but that people find iOS's UI kit more,

00:55:31 ◼   ► they just like it better than they like the equivalent

00:55:37 ◼   ► on Mac, which is called AppKit,

00:55:39 ◼   ► which dates back to the next days.

00:55:41 ◼   ► And so what you're saying is really the opposite though,

00:55:44 ◼   ► that you prefer the Mac to iOS,

00:55:46 ◼   ► but it's not really, from your perspective,

00:55:48 ◼   ► I don't think it's really an AppKit versus UIKit thing,

00:55:50 ◼   ► it's more of a, the freedom of a Mac app,

00:55:55 ◼   ► especially one that's not sandboxed, you know,

00:55:59 ◼   ► it's liberating in some very literal ways.

00:56:05 ◼   ► - It really is.

00:56:06 ◼   ► The personal computer revolution changed the world dramatically.

00:56:11 ◼   ► It brought, going back to democratization, right, it brought power to anybody who could

00:56:17 ◼   ► manage to get a computer in their life.

00:56:20 ◼   ► And that's huge, really, really huge, and it remains huge.

00:56:24 ◼   ► And iOS still isn't liberating in quite that same way.

00:56:29 ◼   ► Maybe it's liberating in other ways, for sure.

00:56:31 ◼   ► You know, you have it in your pocket wherever you go.

00:56:35 ◼   ► But the kind of deeper things that you can do on a Mac are still difficult to impossible

00:56:40 ◼   ► on iOS.

00:56:42 ◼   ► And I like that.

00:56:43 ◼   ► I like being able to do those deeper things and to enable users to do deeper things.

00:56:49 ◼   ► And I sense a certain frustration from you personally about the—again, not like your

00:56:57 ◼   ► anti-app store, but that distributing your software through the app store has pluses

00:57:03 ◼   ► and minuses, but that the minuses weigh you down. It makes it less likely that you're going to do

00:57:08 ◼   ► something for iOS as a nights and weekends type thing. Yeah, that's right. It adds a bunch of

00:57:16 ◼   ► housekeeping. It adds a bunch of stuff I'd just rather not spend time doing, and it separates

00:57:23 ◼   ► me from my users. And I don't like that at all. The fact that Apple provides a download space for

00:57:32 ◼   ► your apps. It's kind of nice, but I wasn't really asking for that. I can just use S3

00:57:37 ◼   ► or whatever. I mean, who cares?

00:57:38 ◼   ► It's sort of a solved problem, right? Nobody—there was a point where it really was, as an indie

00:57:43 ◼   ► developer, it was actually an expense to like, "Well, where am I going to host the actual

00:57:47 ◼   ► like, I guess it was like a .sit file at the time. Where's my stuff at archive with my

00:57:54 ◼   ► app going to be?" Because the bandwidth—but I haven't heard the last time that somebody

00:58:00 ◼   ► ran up a bandwidth bill on downloads.

00:58:03 ◼   ► - Right, and just being on the App Store doesn't, you know,

00:58:06 ◼   ► replace the fact that you need to do marketing.

00:58:08 ◼   ► So whether there's an App Store or not,

00:58:09 ◼   ► you still have to do marketing.

00:58:11 ◼   ► It really just doesn't help that much.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Having something on the App Store,

00:58:17 ◼   ► people aren't just gonna magically find your app.

00:58:19 ◼   ► You still have to do all the stuff you would have done

00:58:21 ◼   ► without an App Store.

00:58:23 ◼   ► - So why another feed reader?

00:58:28 ◼   ► just out of love because I love it.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Another big reason is, you know, I love these technologies.

00:58:34 ◼   ► I love the open web, I love feeds,

00:58:37 ◼   ► and I'd like to see more people use it.

00:58:40 ◼   ► And so that goes to why I'm making it free.

00:58:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I could not, in other words,

00:58:49 ◼   ► like one day, a few years ago,

00:58:52 ◼   ► I just found myself writing an RSS parser,

00:58:54 ◼   ► and I'm like, yep, I'm doing this,

00:58:56 ◼   ► Because obviously my fingers want me to do this and I have no choice.

00:58:59 ◼   ► The name Evergreen is so great too. I wonder, like, how much did that lock you into the idea of,

00:59:08 ◼   ► you know, you have a great name, you almost have to finish writing it out.

00:59:11 ◼   ► That was a relatively recent change, actually. It's had a few different names. The first name was

00:59:16 ◼   ► Seneca, which I love. It's a beautiful name. And, you know, it's the old Roman senator.

00:59:23 ◼   ► It was also the name of the company that made page mill, though they spelled it with a C instead of

00:59:27 ◼   ► an S. And I've wanted to use that name since that time. But the problem is there's also the Seneca

00:59:35 ◼   ► brand apple juice, and I just couldn't get away from that association. I didn't want people coming

00:59:40 ◼   ► to my site thinking that they're going to learn about apple juice. It just didn't work.

00:59:45 ◼   ► Mad Fientist The book, I can't say they're well read enough to have read more than one,

00:59:52 ◼   ► But the one book from the Roman senator Seneca that I think he's best known for is on the

00:59:56 ◼   ► Shortness of Life, which is a great—and a lot of really old books is actually almost

01:00:02 ◼   ► more like an extended essay than a book.

01:00:05 ◼   ► But I will put a link in the show notes to it because it's really a wonderful essay,

01:00:10 ◼   ► something that was written, what, like 2,000 years ago that seems as applicable today as

01:00:15 ◼   ► ever.

01:00:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:17 ◼   ► And it kind of went to my motivations for writing the app.

01:00:21 ◼   ► It's like, you know, apparently this is what I love doing,

01:00:23 ◼   ► so why not just do it?

01:00:25 ◼   ► - I can tell that you're happy

01:00:32 ◼   ► with the set of projects on your plate.

01:00:35 ◼   ► You and I have been friends for a very long time,

01:00:37 ◼   ► and I can just tell you,

01:00:39 ◼   ► it almost sounds like you do have a lot on your plate.

01:00:41 ◼   ► You've got a very juicy day job.

01:00:44 ◼   ► I mean,

01:00:47 ◼   ► we said, you're retooling Frontier to run on a modern Mac. JSON feed, in some sense,

01:00:56 ◼   ► it's kind of, you know, at least that's in the past tense. Like, maybe there will be

01:01:00 ◼   ► an update or something, but if there is, it'll be minor. So you don't have to do a lot of

01:01:03 ◼   ► work on JSON feed, and now you've got—

01:01:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a side project of a side project.

01:01:08 ◼   ► Right. But it is related, though, where I feel like if—I think we're heading to a

01:01:15 ◼   ► path where when Evergreen is at a place where it's usable, where it's more of a closer to

01:01:22 ◼   ► being—yeah, I would call this a complete feed reader. By that time, I'll bet a decent

01:01:28 ◼   ► chunk of the stuff that people are putting into it are JSON feeds. And one of the things—are

01:01:34 ◼   ► you going to have local feeds?

01:01:37 ◼   ► At some point, possibly not in 1.0, but yeah. Yeah, scripted local feeds.

01:01:41 ◼   ► Right, so NetNewswire supported local feeds.

01:01:44 ◼   ► And what you could do, and what that means

01:01:46 ◼   ► is if you're a scripter, you could write your own feeds

01:01:51 ◼   ► locally on your Mac and subscribe to them.

01:01:54 ◼   ► And it could be something like-- if you have a shared Dropbox

01:01:59 ◼   ► folder with people at work, you could generate your own feed

01:02:04 ◼   ► of when items appear in there.

01:02:06 ◼   ► And then if you want to, that would be your notification.

01:02:09 ◼   ► If you're in Newswire all the time, you could see,

01:02:11 ◼   ► oh, there's new items in my shared Dropbox folder,

01:02:14 ◼   ► and that's the thing that you wrote yourself.

01:02:17 ◼   ► I think that it will, in Evergreen,

01:02:21 ◼   ► I think most scripted feeds will be JSON feeds

01:02:24 ◼   ► because they're so much easier to write.

01:02:25 ◼   ► If you're writing a feed,

01:02:27 ◼   ► if you're starting right now to write your own custom feed,

01:02:29 ◼   ► why in the world would you choose

01:02:31 ◼   ► anything other than JSON feed?

01:02:33 ◼   ► - Yep, yeah, 'cause it's as simple as

01:02:35 ◼   ► you build the data structure in code

01:02:38 ◼   ► and say, "All right, JSONify this," and there, we're done.

01:02:43 ◼   ► - So it's 2017, and Brent Simmons is working

01:02:48 ◼   ► on Frontier, an outliner. (laughs)

01:02:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know, I know.

01:02:54 ◼   ► - A feed reader.

01:02:55 ◼   ► - I have like three passions, and I do all three of them,

01:02:58 ◼   ► and that's that.

01:02:59 ◼   ► Which means I'm super lucky, and I had to get

01:03:04 ◼   ► to the age of 49 to be this lucky,

01:03:07 ◼   ► but you know, I've worked my way there.

01:03:10 ◼   ► - All right, let me take another break here

01:03:11 ◼   ► and thank our next sponsor.

01:03:13 ◼   ► It is our good friends at Squarespace.

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01:03:20 ◼   ► They sponsor the show all the time.

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01:03:23 ◼   ► I'm gonna make it short

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01:03:36 ◼   ► You've got templates to choose from that

01:03:39 ◼   ► are both stylistic templates in terms of what

01:03:41 ◼   ► do you think it's going to look like and functional templates

01:03:44 ◼   ► in terms of what is it that you're making.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Are you starting a new podcast?

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01:03:51 ◼   ► where you'll have entries and that sort of thing.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Or are you building a store because you're selling stuff?

01:03:58 ◼   ► Maybe you're making t-shirts or something like that

01:04:01 ◼   ► and you want to sell them.

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01:04:04 ◼   ► your website is finished and it's there.

01:04:06 ◼   ► and it's a real website, the thing that you make in Squarespace, it is the thing.

01:04:11 ◼   ► There is no separate mode for like, well, here's what it would look like,

01:04:15 ◼   ► and now you have to build it in generator or something like that.

01:04:17 ◼   ► Like as you make these choices and drag these things out,

01:04:21 ◼   ► and move them around on screen and change the names, you have a website.

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01:04:30 ◼   ► go to squarespace.com and use this code, Gruber.

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01:05:04 ◼   ► My thanks to Squarespace for their continued sponsorship of the talk show.

01:05:10 ◼   ► Anything else you want to talk about on Evergreen?

01:05:12 ◼   ► Oh, just the meaning of the name.

01:05:16 ◼   ► I think the obvious thing is the idea that the open web and feeds and syndication are

01:05:21 ◼   ► Evergreen things.

01:05:24 ◼   ► They haven't gone away.

01:05:25 ◼   ► There's still a lot of people that like this stuff, and still a lot of people who will

01:05:28 ◼   ► like this stuff.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But it's also, I live in Washington state, which is the Evergreen state.

01:05:34 ◼   ► I went to Evergreen State College.

01:05:37 ◼   ► So it has both some public and some personal meaning.

01:05:41 ◼   ► I just love the name.

01:05:43 ◼   ► I do love the name.

01:05:44 ◼   ► Manton.

01:05:45 ◼   ► I know Manton loves it.

01:05:46 ◼   ► I think Manton loves it more than you do.

01:05:49 ◼   ► And I didn't know all the backstory there.

01:05:50 ◼   ► I just knew part of that.

01:05:52 ◼   ► So I love it even more now.

01:05:53 ◼   ► I have a question for you, Brennan.

01:05:55 ◼   ► mentioned the first thing you said about Evergreen was the GitHub URL and you've

01:06:01 ◼   ► open-sourced some stuff but in the past I think most of the things you open

01:06:06 ◼   ► source are later in a project when it's done or you know or it's you know mature

01:06:12 ◼   ► or whatever and this is the first thing I can think of in a while that you've

01:06:15 ◼   ► open-sourced at the very beginning have you thought about like what that means

01:06:20 ◼   ► like what is that going to change any way you approach this and how the app will evolve or,

01:06:26 ◼   ► you know, be forked into other apps and you know, who knows, you know, it's kind of

01:06:29 ◼   ► just a different process than you've used before.

01:06:33 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good question. So this is open source, as is the work I'm doing on Frontier.

01:06:38 ◼   ► And for me, it's exciting because I feel in a way like I'm performing in public.

01:06:46 ◼   ► I get the right blog posts about it.

01:06:48 ◼   ► People who want to follow the commits can look at it

01:06:51 ◼   ► and just see how something like this is made.

01:06:55 ◼   ► And maybe for people who aren't developers,

01:06:58 ◼   ► but know enough to be able to understand what's going on,

01:07:01 ◼   ► maybe it'll be interesting to them.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And maybe for newer developers,

01:07:05 ◼   ► it'll be a way to learn from my mistakes

01:07:10 ◼   ► as well as the things that I do well.

01:07:14 ◼   ► So I almost feel like I'm inventing a new literary form,

01:07:19 ◼   ► not as high art, but the form of, you know,

01:07:25 ◼   ► here's a bunch of code,

01:07:26 ◼   ► here's a bunch of writing about that code.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Not that nobody's ever done that before,

01:07:30 ◼   ► of course they have,

01:07:31 ◼   ► but I'm just really into that aspect of it.

01:07:36 ◼   ► Of all my things I've made,

01:07:38 ◼   ► my blog is my longest running, started in 1999.

01:07:42 ◼   ► And it's also the thing I'm most proud of.

01:07:44 ◼   ► So sometimes I think I'm doing all this

01:07:46 ◼   ► just so I have something to write about.

01:07:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:07:50 ◼   ► - I'm keenly aware of blogs that predate Daring Fireball

01:07:55 ◼   ► because it's, when I had the idea to do Daring Fireball,

01:08:00 ◼   ► it was, the motivation was like a ball rolling downhill

01:08:05 ◼   ► where every day it went by before I launched it,

01:08:08 ◼   ► I wished more I already had it.

01:08:10 ◼   ► and I had it, you know. And it was the blogs that other people were writing that was making

01:08:18 ◼   ► me want to do it, right? It's, you know, Kotke and Inessential and Andy Bayo's waxy.org

01:08:26 ◼   ► launched I think about six months before Daring Fireball. And the ones that are still going,

01:08:30 ◼   ► I'm so happy about. I'm so happy that Inessential is still going. Every once in a while, I'm

01:08:35 ◼   ► reading Kotke. I read it every day, but every once in a while, I'm like, "You know what?

01:08:39 ◼   ► I fucking love that Jason Kottke is still killing it with Kottke.

01:08:42 ◼   ► Yeah, he's amazing.

01:08:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:45 ◼   ► It just makes me so happy that it's just all these years gone by, and I could totally

01:08:51 ◼   ► see that.

01:08:52 ◼   ► And the original blog, Scripting News, still going strong.

01:08:55 ◼   ► Of course.

01:08:56 ◼   ► Of course.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:08:58 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And it ties into the creation of RSS and podcasting and everything with Dave Weiner, and absolutely

01:09:01 ◼   ► a huge, huge motivating force.

01:09:04 ◼   ► One of the things about Dave that was a huge inspiration for me, beyond his technical contributions

01:09:10 ◼   ► and the creation of all these things that my entire career hangs on, but one of the

01:09:16 ◼   ► things about Dave that I was so super inspired by was that Dave had a column for Wired magazine.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I forget if it was just on the web

01:09:33 ◼   ► or if he was in the actual paper,

01:09:35 ◼   ► but I know he was on Hotwired.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And he had his blog.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And the thing about Dave that was very clear

01:09:43 ◼   ► is that I could tell that he liked writing for his blog

01:09:45 ◼   ► better than he did writing for somebody else.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And it wasn't like he started the blog

01:09:49 ◼   ► so that he could get a column at Wired.

01:09:51 ◼   ► It was like he wrote the column at Wired

01:09:53 ◼   ► so that more people would read his stuff,

01:09:54 ◼   ► but it was, you know,

01:09:56 ◼   ► his own thing was the more important thing.

01:09:58 ◼   ► And that's the thing that he's, you know,

01:10:00 ◼   ► 25 years later still doing.

01:10:01 ◼   ► And it was a huge inspiration for me,

01:10:03 ◼   ► which was that I wanted to do Daring Fireball

01:10:05 ◼   ► and make it, make Daring Fireball my career,

01:10:07 ◼   ► not write Daring Fireball, get well-known

01:10:10 ◼   ► and then go write for Macworld or something.

01:10:12 ◼   ► So anyway, there's a nice shout out to Dave.

01:10:16 ◼   ► - I remember-- - And it's funny at that,

01:10:19 ◼   ► at that time, I mean, I remember feeling like,

01:10:22 ◼   ► gosh, there's so many blogs, like, do we need another blog?

01:10:25 ◼   ► Do I need to start one?

01:10:26 ◼   ► I know some people today are probably feeling that way.

01:10:28 ◼   ► Like maybe they want to start a blog,

01:10:29 ◼   ► but there's so many.

01:10:31 ◼   ► But of course, like 10, 15 years ago,

01:10:36 ◼   ► it was certainly not too late to start a blog.

01:10:38 ◼   ► Now, if you started a blog that long ago,

01:10:39 ◼   ► you were one of the oldest blogs on the web.

01:10:42 ◼   ► And so, I don't know, I hope people kind of can help

01:10:46 ◼   ► put that in perspective for people.

01:10:47 ◼   ► Like it's never too late.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And a lot of these blogs, I mean, we talk about Twitter,

01:10:53 ◼   ► we talk about Facebook and how long

01:10:54 ◼   ► these services might be around.

01:10:56 ◼   ► They're all younger than like our blogs.

01:10:59 ◼   ► And so, you know, it's a, when you stretch it out five, 10, 15 years, where do you want your writing to be?

01:11:07 ◼   ► Like where, if you're passionate about writing on the web, obviously Dave is, obviously you all are, where do you want that content to live?

01:11:13 ◼   ► And it's, you know, I think blogs obviously are a great solution.

01:11:18 ◼   ► Hold that thought, man.

01:11:26 ◼   ► I was going to tell the story of how I got into Frontier in the first place.

01:11:29 ◼   ► I don't know if I've ever said before. Well, hold that thought. I'm going to tell you about another

01:11:37 ◼   ► friend of the show. And we'll do that, and then we're going to talk about man and blogging.

01:11:42 ◼   ► But it's our good friends at Away. Away is a company, another one of these podcast,

01:11:50 ◼   ► prototypical podcast sponsors that sell stuff direct to you. What do they make? They make

01:11:55 ◼   ► luggage. They make really nice suitcases, and they have a carry-on. The carry-on is sort of their

01:12:01 ◼   ► prime example. That's the one that you want to look at. I've got one. I've been using it for,

01:12:08 ◼   ► I forget how many months now, but it's now my go-to carry-on for everywhere I go. Hard case,

01:12:14 ◼   ► really nicely made. Mine still looks brand new. I mean, the carry-ons, you get a lot less wear and

01:12:19 ◼   ► and tear on because they don't go underneath the airplane.

01:12:22 ◼   ► Really nice size.

01:12:23 ◼   ► Wonderful wheels.

01:12:25 ◼   ► The wheels-- oh my god.

01:12:26 ◼   ► I had a carry-on suitcase.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Maybe it was just because it was old.

01:12:28 ◼   ► But I had one that was like-- as I'd go through the airport,

01:12:31 ◼   ► it was like squeaking and made terrible noise.

01:12:34 ◼   ► The way it rolls so nice, it's like you don't even

01:12:37 ◼   ► have to put any energy into it.

01:12:38 ◼   ► It almost goes too fast.

01:12:40 ◼   ► But here's the thing that they've got that is so brilliant

01:12:43 ◼   ► is they've built into the carry-on suitcase

01:12:46 ◼   ► a battery charger.

01:12:48 ◼   ► It's like, by the standards of something

01:12:51 ◼   ► you would carry in your pocket, it's huge.

01:12:54 ◼   ► It's got two USB ports, so two phones or two iPads.

01:12:57 ◼   ► You can charge them at once.

01:12:58 ◼   ► Anything that charges by USB, you can charge from this thing.

01:13:01 ◼   ► And so when you're at the airport

01:13:03 ◼   ► and you're waiting for your flight to go off,

01:13:05 ◼   ► you don't have to hunt around for one of the two

01:13:07 ◼   ► seats in the whole terminal that has a charger

01:13:10 ◼   ► or electrical outlet nearby.

01:13:12 ◼   ► And they never put them near seats anyway.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Everybody, if you go to the airport,

01:13:15 ◼   ► you see people sitting on the floor

01:13:17 ◼   ► so that they can be near the port

01:13:18 ◼   ► and there's probably somebody already sitting there.

01:13:21 ◼   ► You just take any seat you can

01:13:22 ◼   ► and if you need to charge your phone,

01:13:23 ◼   ► you just plug it right in your suitcase.

01:13:25 ◼   ► It is brilliant.

01:13:26 ◼   ► This is such a great idea.

01:13:27 ◼   ► And it's a really great suitcase.

01:13:30 ◼   ► They've got all sorts of nice stuff inside

01:13:31 ◼   ► to help you organize your stuff,

01:13:33 ◼   ► keep your shirts separate and not get 'em wrinkled,

01:13:36 ◼   ► stuff like that.

01:13:38 ◼   ► So what do you do to find out more?

01:13:41 ◼   ► Go to their website.

01:13:42 ◼   ► It's awaytravel.com.

01:13:44 ◼   ► awaytravel.com/talkshow

01:13:48 ◼   ► and use the promo code talkshow during checkout

01:13:51 ◼   ► and you will save 20 bucks on your suitcase.

01:13:54 ◼   ► I've got one, I recommend it super thoroughly.

01:13:57 ◼   ► Go there and check it out, awaytravel.com/talkshow.

01:14:02 ◼   ► All right, back to the show.

01:14:04 ◼   ► And Brent, you were gonna tell a story

01:14:05 ◼   ► about how you got involved with Frontier in the first place.

01:14:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not a huge story, but so it was 1995

01:14:11 ◼   ► I was literally, I had a job as a secretary. I didn't have a CS degree. And the office had four

01:14:17 ◼   ► people in it, including me, but we all had Macs, so I was a secretary. And one night, I was bored

01:14:23 ◼   ► at home and I typed into the search engine in my browser, which I think was Lycos at the time,

01:14:32 ◼   ► before Google even existed, "free Mac software" was my search term. And what that brought up was

01:14:39 ◼   ► an article of Dave Weiner's on Hotwired, I'd never heard of him before, where he was talking about

01:14:44 ◼   ► the release of Aretha, which was a free version of Frontier, technically a Frontier 4.0 beta.

01:14:52 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Oh, something for programming. Cool. I want to get back into programming."

01:14:56 ◼   ► I was thinking to myself, I downloaded it and I loved it. And like, that,

01:15:00 ◼   ► the entire rest of my career comes from like that one search on that one day.

01:15:06 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:15:11 ◼   ► That's kind of amazing, right?

01:15:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:14 ◼   ► And everything falls out of that.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Syndication formats, outliners.

01:15:20 ◼   ► I mean, that is the one thing, too, that maybe we didn't mention before about Frontier,

01:15:24 ◼   ► is that the source code editor for Frontier was an outliner,

01:15:29 ◼   ► not just a simple text editor.

01:15:31 ◼   ► editor.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And people tend to write almost all modern programming

01:15:36 ◼   ► languages in an outline-like format, where you say--

01:15:41 ◼   ► if you say if this, then do these things,

01:15:45 ◼   ► the do these things block, people

01:15:47 ◼   ► tend to tab them in one more level of hierarchy

01:15:51 ◼   ► to the right.

01:15:52 ◼   ► And then when you're done with that block of only do this

01:15:55 ◼   ► if this if statement is true, you

01:15:58 ◼   ► go back out to the next level.

01:15:59 ◼   ► but Frontier took it to the level where it was literally

01:16:03 ◼   ► like on the outliner, like enforced as an outliner.

01:16:08 ◼   ► - Right.

01:16:09 ◼   ► And if you have a good outliner, it makes restructuring,

01:16:12 ◼   ► indenting, unindenting, et cetera,

01:16:14 ◼   ► really, really easy and really, really fast.

01:16:17 ◼   ► And it also makes it nice, you can collapse stuff

01:16:20 ◼   ► so you can see your code at a higher level and so on.

01:16:23 ◼   ► I know we have code folding

01:16:25 ◼   ► in a lot of text editors these days,

01:16:27 ◼   ► but an outliner is, that's like the cheap version

01:16:30 ◼   ► of what a good outliner gets you.

01:16:32 ◼   ► - Right, and it gets rid of any arguments

01:16:34 ◼   ► over tabs versus spaces.

01:16:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's right, 'cause who cares?

01:16:38 ◼   ► - My favorite story about working with you,

01:16:41 ◼   ► I think I've said this before on the show,

01:16:43 ◼   ► but with Vesper, you handled all of the programming.

01:16:46 ◼   ► And there's one line of code

01:16:50 ◼   ► that was like a regular expression that I wrote.

01:16:53 ◼   ► I wrote one line of code for Vesper,

01:16:54 ◼   ► and of course it was a regular expression.

01:16:56 ◼   ► But at one point, I did have Vesper checked out so I could do my own builds, because it's

01:17:03 ◼   ► just what you're doing, you're developing.

01:17:05 ◼   ► I could update changes.

01:17:07 ◼   ► And there were things I would commit, like language, like if there was stuff to write,

01:17:11 ◼   ► I might contribute stuff like that.

01:17:13 ◼   ► But one time I started just—I was like, "You know what?

01:17:15 ◼   ► I wonder how the hell this works."

01:17:16 ◼   ► And I just started going through the source code to Vesper, and I realized that you were

01:17:21 ◼   ► all over the map on tabs versus spaces.

01:17:24 ◼   ► Right, yeah.

01:17:25 ◼   ► So, I was, all these people were like, "You should use spaces."

01:17:29 ◼   ► So, I'm like, started best for them, I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to switch to spaces."

01:17:33 ◼   ► And a little while in, I'm like, "God, I hate spaces.

01:17:35 ◼   ► I'm going to go back to using tabs."

01:17:37 ◼   ► But I didn't go through and reformat everything.

01:17:39 ◼   ► And so, on my machine, everything was indented and lined up perfectly.

01:17:43 ◼   ► But if your settings were different from mine, I think you said at one point I indented like

01:17:49 ◼   ► a drunken sailor.

01:17:50 ◼   ► That's exactly what it looked like.

01:17:52 ◼   ► But on my machine, it was all perfect.

01:17:54 ◼   ► So yeah.

01:17:55 ◼   ► And I've stuck with tabs ever since. It's at that Omni where spaces are the rule.

01:17:59 ◼   ► For those who don't know, it's a long-standing and never-ending debate in the programming world,

01:18:05 ◼   ► where some programmers, when they indent code, they use spaces, and some use tabs.

01:18:10 ◼   ► And it gets very, very—sometimes these arguments can get very emotional, because the stakes are so low, right?

01:18:22 ◼   ► It's just like anything in life. Because it seems like such a trivial issue, people

01:18:29 ◼   ► get very worked up about it. But usually, an institution like a group, a company, or

01:18:34 ◼   ► something like the Omni Group is going to just have a, "Here's our coding standards.

01:18:37 ◼   ► Everybody uses spaces. Then there's no debate." I was appalled by the state of Vesper's

01:18:44 ◼   ► indentation.

01:18:45 ◼   ► I'm a little surprised.

01:18:46 ◼   ► I would have been too if I had seen that. But again, on my machine, everything was perfect.

01:18:51 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't know what to say.

01:18:53 ◼   ► - Omni use the spaces is fascinating to me

01:18:55 ◼   ► because I'm certainly tabs and I'm not gonna start

01:18:58 ◼   ► or finish that debate on this.

01:18:59 ◼   ► But traditionally I feel like Mac programmers,

01:19:02 ◼   ► especially classic Mac,

01:19:04 ◼   ► like I remember when I started programming the Mac

01:19:06 ◼   ► in the classic days, like no one used spaces.

01:19:09 ◼   ► I mean, I literally, I can't remember any

01:19:11 ◼   ► ever encountering code with spaces instead of tabs.

01:19:14 ◼   ► And slowly over the years and decades,

01:19:17 ◼   ► especially as people come from other programming communities,

01:19:20 ◼   ► spaces become more and more dominant,

01:19:22 ◼   ► so I would be surprised now if spaces aren't more common.

01:19:25 ◼   ► But I'm kind of surprised to hear about Omni.

01:19:27 ◼   ► That's fascinating.

01:19:27 ◼   ► - Oh, maybe they're old Next developers.

01:19:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:19:29 ◼   ► That's kind of a wrinkle in things.

01:19:32 ◼   ► - My basic, I'm with you, man,

01:19:35 ◼   ► and I think Mac users tend to be tabs people,

01:19:38 ◼   ► and my thought was, always was,

01:19:40 ◼   ► I mean, this is back to the '90s,

01:19:41 ◼   ► is why in the world would I want four spaces

01:19:44 ◼   ► when I have to backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace

01:19:46 ◼   ► to get rid of one when I can just hit backspace once

01:19:49 ◼   ► to get rid of a tab?

01:19:50 ◼   ► And yes, I know that everybody who codes with spaces now,

01:19:53 ◼   ► that modern code editors will smartly delete

01:19:57 ◼   ► all four spaces when you hit it,

01:19:58 ◼   ► so it treats it the same way.

01:20:00 ◼   ► But why create the need for a special case?

01:20:03 ◼   ► Like, it's exactly what the tab key is for.

01:20:06 ◼   ► - Right, that's why the tab key exists.

01:20:09 ◼   ► And like, I might want my indentation to look much wider

01:20:12 ◼   ► than, you know, I might want it to look like eight

01:20:14 ◼   ► or something, and you can't do that with spaces.

01:20:17 ◼   ► I think, to your point about editors kind of hide this,

01:20:20 ◼   ► I bet a lot of people don't even know what they're setting.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Xcode might default to spaces now, I'm not sure,

01:20:27 ◼   ► but I bet most people don't even know

01:20:29 ◼   ► if they're using tabs or spaces.

01:20:32 ◼   ► - Kids today don't even know if they should be upset

01:20:34 ◼   ► about tabs versus spaces.

01:20:35 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:20:38 ◼   ► God damn kids.

01:20:39 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:20:40 ◼   ► - All right, so Manton, I mentioned it before.

01:20:46 ◼   ► Micro.blog, that's your new platform for microblogging.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Tell me about it.

01:20:54 ◼   ► - Sure, so the idea is with microblogging,

01:20:58 ◼   ► and is, you know, Twitter, you know,

01:21:00 ◼   ► people like Twitter, right?

01:21:02 ◼   ► Posts are short, they're easy, kind of effortless.

01:21:05 ◼   ► You should put that on your own site too,

01:21:06 ◼   ► is the basic premise.

01:21:07 ◼   ► Like you should have a blog,

01:21:08 ◼   ► and you can have short posts on there, and it's fine.

01:21:11 ◼   ► And short posts, you know, a lot of people,

01:21:14 ◼   ► they don't wanna start a blog, or they have a blog,

01:21:16 ◼   ► they don't know what to write because it's kind of daunting.

01:21:18 ◼   ► They have to have a title and write multiple paragraphs

01:21:21 ◼   ► and have to sound really intelligent.

01:21:22 ◼   ► And with short microblogging, it removes all of that, right?

01:21:27 ◼   ► It's okay to just post something that's a couple sentences.

01:21:30 ◼   ► And that's the basic premise.

01:21:32 ◼   ► It's a blog publishing platform,

01:21:34 ◼   ► but it's also kind of a social network.

01:21:35 ◼   ► So you can follow people like you can on Twitter.

01:21:38 ◼   ► You can cross post to Twitter.

01:21:40 ◼   ► And going kind of back to JSON-FE2,

01:21:43 ◼   ► I mean, it shares some similar themes

01:21:46 ◼   ► and just like helping get the message out, kind of like encouraging

01:21:51 ◼   ► people to think about blogs and feed readers again.

01:21:53 ◼   ► That's the, that's the most important goal, I think, of microdot blog.

01:21:57 ◼   ► Now you launched this as a Kickstarter campaign.

01:22:00 ◼   ► Um, and I know I, as somebody who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign,

01:22:07 ◼   ► that's where I got my microdot blog account from.

01:22:10 ◼   ► Where does it stand now on like signups?

01:22:12 ◼   ► I haven't even looked like can people who didn't

01:22:15 ◼   ► warn in on a Kickstarter get an account at micro.blog?

01:22:20 ◼   ► - Not yet, it's still for Kickstarter backers.

01:22:23 ◼   ► So I opened it up to Kickstarter backers

01:22:27 ◼   ► about a month ago now.

01:22:28 ◼   ► And I guess we're kind of on track

01:22:31 ◼   ► for where we thought it would be,

01:22:33 ◼   ► but you kind of using that early period

01:22:36 ◼   ► with Kickstarter backers to get feedback, make it better.

01:22:40 ◼   ► The iPhone app is not in the app store yet, right?

01:22:42 ◼   ► So it's all via test flights, so it's kind of still a beta.

01:22:45 ◼   ► And then we'll slowly start opening it up to more people

01:22:49 ◼   ► and eventually everybody, yeah, pretty soon,

01:22:51 ◼   ► but don't have an exact date yet.

01:22:53 ◼   ► - But it's also the sort of thing where it's federated,

01:22:56 ◼   ► where somebody else can create their own hosted service

01:23:00 ◼   ► that is completely compatible.

01:23:03 ◼   ► It's not like, I think it's worth clarifying

01:23:06 ◼   ► that your micro.blog is not an attempt

01:23:08 ◼   ► to make like a quote unquote open Twitter.

01:23:12 ◼   ► It's not a unified centralized social network type thing.

01:23:17 ◼   ► It's really just a hosting service for short posts.

01:23:21 ◼   ► - Right, and it's a little confusing

01:23:23 ◼   ► 'cause it's kind of a mix of things.

01:23:24 ◼   ► And it's not right now completely federated.

01:23:27 ◼   ► Like if people have heard of Mastodon,

01:23:30 ◼   ► which has got some popularity over the last month or so,

01:23:34 ◼   ► which is more federated,

01:23:36 ◼   ► where you have more kind of instances

01:23:38 ◼   ► of a Twitter-like service running.

01:23:41 ◼   ► It's a little different than that in that instead of like,

01:23:45 ◼   ► just installing the micro.blog software yourself,

01:23:47 ◼   ► you just use blog software, right?

01:23:50 ◼   ► So you just use WordPress.

01:23:51 ◼   ► Like if you wanna run your own site,

01:23:52 ◼   ► you just use WordPress or Jekyll

01:23:55 ◼   ► or some other blog publishing platform that you like.

01:23:59 ◼   ► And then it hooks together into micro.blog

01:24:01 ◼   ► so you can follow people.

01:24:03 ◼   ► And if you don't, if WordPress is too much

01:24:05 ◼   ► and you just want something simple,

01:24:06 ◼   ► then we can host a microblog for you

01:24:08 ◼   ► and just make it really easy.

01:24:09 ◼   ► And that's part of it, just like making this easier.

01:24:11 ◼   ► I think blog feed readers, publishing platforms,

01:24:16 ◼   ► they're not as easy as they should be.

01:24:19 ◼   ► And that's why Twitter and Facebook are so popular in part

01:24:22 ◼   ► because it just makes it a lot easier.

01:24:25 ◼   ► I was thinking back to,

01:24:28 ◼   ► when you wrote, John, about Twitter apps

01:24:32 ◼   ► are like a UI playground years ago,

01:24:34 ◼   ► it's like there's all this excitement in Twitter apps.

01:24:38 ◼   ► And of course, Twitter started discouraging

01:24:41 ◼   ► third-party apps and that kind of faded away. But there was a time where people were having

01:24:45 ◼   ► a lot of fun building these apps because you could do so much in the UI with such a simple

01:24:52 ◼   ► idea. And I think that simple idea can be for other blogs, not just Twitter. It should be that

01:24:59 ◼   ► easy to post to your own site, basically. That's a good way to put it. You should write that down.

01:25:05 ◼   ► It should be micro.blog. It should be that easy to post to your own site.

01:25:11 ◼   ► - That's good. - And you support things.

01:25:12 ◼   ► You've got support for things like photos.

01:25:15 ◼   ► So you could, if you wanted to,

01:25:17 ◼   ► somebody's micro.blog feed might just be like a sort of,

01:25:22 ◼   ► I follow you there, and you often post updates

01:25:25 ◼   ► about your work on micro.blog itself.

01:25:28 ◼   ► It's sort of like your public record of,

01:25:31 ◼   ► here's the progress I'm making on this thing

01:25:33 ◼   ► that I know that people are following along with.

01:25:36 ◼   ► But somebody else could do it

01:25:38 ◼   ► and effectively use their micro.blog

01:25:40 ◼   ► like their own personal self-hosted Instagram, where they just post like a, you know, take one

01:25:46 ◼   ► nice photo every day and post it. Yep. Yeah. And I'm seeing a lot of that. I'm really happy to see

01:25:51 ◼   ► it. And that the official microdubler app tries to kind of encourage that by having, you know,

01:25:56 ◼   ► it's not as full feature as Instagram, but it has the filters and it has square photos, which

01:26:02 ◼   ► actually turns out they work really well in timelines like that. And it just make it really

01:26:07 ◼   ► easy to post photos.

01:26:10 ◼   ► And I think that's really important.

01:26:11 ◼   ► I think like photo blogging is like a really important kind of variation on microblogging.

01:26:17 ◼   ► You don't have to write a lot.

01:26:19 ◼   ► You can, everyone takes photos.

01:26:21 ◼   ► Sometimes they're really good and worth sharing.

01:26:23 ◼   ► And Instagram is an interesting point now too as being part of Facebook.

01:26:28 ◼   ► I'm not going to say there's going to be a pushback against Instagram.

01:26:31 ◼   ► Like Instagram is probably not going anywhere.

01:26:33 ◼   ► I still love Instagram.

01:26:35 ◼   ► But I think there are a lot of people that are aware of the trade-offs with using Instagram

01:26:41 ◼   ► and Facebook, and they love the idea of having those photos on their own blog as kind of

01:26:46 ◼   ► like the first they go to my blog, and the next they optionally go to Twitter or Instagram.

01:26:53 ◼   ► Making money is often in conflict with simplicity.

01:26:59 ◼   ► That's a broad statement, but I think it's often true.

01:27:03 ◼   ► And I think Instagram is an example of that, where I still like Instagram a lot, but I

01:27:08 ◼   ► don't like it as much as I used to when Instagram was just square photos with filters, and there

01:27:15 ◼   ► was nothing else.

01:27:17 ◼   ► I get the stories thing now.

01:27:19 ◼   ► I don't really—I posted like—I went through a car wash a couple weeks ago, and I love

01:27:25 ◼   ► being in it.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Ever since I was a kid, I like driving my car through a car wash.

01:27:29 ◼   ► It's just like neat sounds.

01:27:31 ◼   ► I don't know, and it looks cool.

01:27:32 ◼   ► so I posted an Instagram story from the car wash.

01:27:35 ◼   ► But for the most part, I don't really get the idea

01:27:38 ◼   ► of posting something that's gonna disappear.

01:27:40 ◼   ► It just doesn't fit me personality-wise.

01:27:45 ◼   ► There's all sorts of stuff that I would never post

01:27:47 ◼   ► to the internet just because,

01:27:49 ◼   ► obviously I'm a public person in terms of my writing

01:27:54 ◼   ► and stuff, but I'm in large part pretty private.

01:27:57 ◼   ► So I don't do things, like I don't check,

01:28:00 ◼   ► when I go to a restaurant, I don't check in.

01:28:01 ◼   ► I've never done that.

01:28:02 ◼   ► I don't understand it.

01:28:03 ◼   ► I don't know why I would want to.

01:28:05 ◼   ► I don't know why I'd want other people

01:28:07 ◼   ► to know what restaurant I'm at, et cetera.

01:28:09 ◼   ► But I just feel, I can kind of ignore it in Instagram,

01:28:14 ◼   ► but it just, I don't know.

01:28:16 ◼   ► It just seems to me like two different things,

01:28:19 ◼   ► whereas I look at, like I'm looking at micro.blog right now

01:28:23 ◼   ► and I'm scrolling down and it's like,

01:28:24 ◼   ► well, this is just nice.

01:28:25 ◼   ► It's just like a list of things I signed up to see

01:28:27 ◼   ► and then the only things that are there

01:28:29 ◼   ► the date that they were posted, a reply button, and a favorite button. And that's it. I like that.

01:28:35 ◼   ► Brent Durand (01h00m 11s): Yeah. The idea is kind of back to basics in a way. And of course,

01:28:40 ◼   ► no ads and things like that because the business is just helping people post their blog or help

01:28:46 ◼   ► make it easier. The business is not to grow to billions of users and put ads in their face.

01:28:51 ◼   ► Jim Collins (01h00m 28s): And again, all this stuff that the three of us are talking about today,

01:28:53 ◼   ► they all sort of interrelate. And Brent, I think that there's an angle with that with making

01:28:57 ◼   ► Evergreen just a free open source Mac app where you've got a day job at Omni Group,

01:29:03 ◼   ► which is a company that knows how to make money on software, but that frees you up.

01:29:08 ◼   ► Like Evergreen is, it must be liberating in some ways that you don't have to worry about

01:29:12 ◼   ► Evergreen selling for $19 a copy or whatever the price would be.

01:29:17 ◼   ► It very much is. Yeah. I kept thinking, well, at some point I'll have to deal with licenses

01:29:22 ◼   ► and demo version? Do I make a lite version available? And what about when people lose

01:29:27 ◼   ► their serial number?" And I'm like, "Ugh, don't make me." And it's just like, "You know, I don't

01:29:33 ◼   ► have to do it. All right, so I won't make that money, but whatever, I'm fine."

01:29:37 ◼   ► So it's a lot easier to have fun when there's no need to make money.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Matt, you've got a complicated relationship with Twitter in history.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And so one of the things that you've done in the past is you—I think it's correct to talk about

01:29:57 ◼   ► it in a past sense—but you had Tweet Library, which was an iPhone app, right?

01:30:04 ◼   ► Matt

01:30:04 ◼   ► Yeah, it started as an iPad app and then it became a universal app for both iPhone and iPad.

01:30:09 ◼   ► And it's, again, it's the same, it's just like with Brent, it's your same obsessions coming back over. Tell us about, what was Tweet Library?

01:30:17 ◼   ► Yeah, so and then Tweet Library kind of came out of that same period that I referenced too, of like lots of innovation in Twitter apps.

01:30:23 ◼   ► And my take on it was, it actually kind of fits in with your Instagram comment too, is like, why would I want to post something that disappears?

01:30:32 ◼   ► And I feel the same way. I kind of experimented with Instagram stories, but I don't have a Snapchat account.

01:30:38 ◼   ► To me, if I'm taking a picture or I'm writing something, if I'm bothering to write it down, it kind of matters to me.

01:30:44 ◼   ► And so I want it to last forever as long as possible. I want it to be in my domain name, and I want to be able to find it later.

01:30:51 ◼   ► And so Tweet Library was along those lines of, "How can I download all my tweets, search them, filter them by keywords or date, maybe export them or collect tweets together?"

01:31:01 ◼   ► And back then, Twitter was, I mean, Twitter has some,

01:31:06 ◼   ► it has better search now, at least in the website,

01:31:09 ◼   ► has better like collecting tweets together.

01:31:12 ◼   ► But back then it was much more difficult

01:31:14 ◼   ► to find old tweets.

01:31:15 ◼   ► And so I wanted an app that could do that.

01:31:18 ◼   ► You're right in the past tense, I don't sell it anymore.

01:31:22 ◼   ► It was hard to let that app go,

01:31:24 ◼   ► but I went through a phase of being very frustrated

01:31:28 ◼   ► Twitter and it didn't make much sense to keep working on that app for that reason

01:31:34 ◼   ► and also just because there were other apps that started to do the same thing.

01:31:37 ◼   ► Yeah and it's a semi-recent thing but they now, Twitter does now have a thing

01:31:43 ◼   ► where you can say send me an archive of all of my tweets from history and then

01:31:47 ◼   ► like two days later you get an email with like a download link. Yeah and I

01:31:51 ◼   ► actually added a feature to tweet library where you could, yeah you get a

01:31:54 ◼   ► download link that's like a zip file and I you could import that directly into

01:31:57 ◼   ► which was really great because the first version of Tweet Library couldn't do that.

01:32:01 ◼   ► You basically had to run the app every once in a while, make sure it downloaded everything for you.

01:32:05 ◼   ► But you yourself

01:32:09 ◼   ► don't really use Twitter anymore?

01:32:13 ◼   ► Not really. I got frustrated

01:32:17 ◼   ► when Twitter was just becoming

01:32:21 ◼   ► developer hostile. We're talking about

01:32:25 ◼   ► about feeds a lot, they removed their RSS feeds is one example of something they did,

01:32:30 ◼   ► locked down their API a little more, you know, put limits on how big a

01:32:35 ◼   ► Twitter app could get in terms of popularity compared to the official app, the whole famous

01:32:40 ◼   ► kind of app tokens that they limited and various other shutting down other Twitter apps.

01:32:47 ◼   ► And so I kind of left, I kind of threw a fin, left Twitter for a number of years.

01:32:53 ◼   ► And in fact, my original Twitter account, which is over 10 years ago now, I do not post to it and don't log in as it ever anymore.

01:33:03 ◼   ► As kind of a, I left Twitter, it was actually one year after Steve Jobs died and I collected a bunch of stuff about Steve, a lot of tweets and stuff.

01:33:12 ◼   ► And I wanted to mark the occasion of leaving.

01:33:16 ◼   ► It's like this is something that I think was great about Twitter, like something that made Twitter really special.

01:33:21 ◼   ► And so I just haven't touched it.

01:33:22 ◼   ► I just let it be what it is.

01:33:24 ◼   ► And I feel like if I went back to that account,

01:33:26 ◼   ► it would kind of, you know, it would like cheapen

01:33:30 ◼   ► like what I was trying to capture.

01:33:33 ◼   ► And that was like five years ago now, I guess,

01:33:35 ◼   ► four or five years ago.

01:33:36 ◼   ► And so what I have done though,

01:33:37 ◼   ► is I created a separate Twitter account,

01:33:40 ◼   ► Manton2 where I cross post stuff.

01:33:42 ◼   ► So if I post something in my blog,

01:33:43 ◼   ► automatically cross posts to Twitter.

01:33:45 ◼   ► And I started as an experiment and I thought I would stop,

01:33:48 ◼   ► but I just kind of kept doing it anyway

01:33:51 ◼   ► for people who don't have feed readers and they want to kind of keep up with my blog,

01:33:55 ◼   ► they can follow that account.

01:33:56 ◼   ► Or if they want to effectively use Twitter as a sort of poor man's feed reader.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:34:02 ◼   ► And I know a lot of people do that.

01:34:03 ◼   ► I personally, I mean, if that works for you, I guess that's great.

01:34:06 ◼   ► But I mean, I love traditional feed readers and hope to see more activity, obviously,

01:34:11 ◼   ► in feed readers with JSON feed and whatnot.

01:34:13 ◼   ► So that doesn't work for me, but if it works for you, you know, you can follow Twitter

01:34:17 ◼   ► accounts that way.

01:34:20 ◼   ► So where do you see, how do you think the launch of Microdublog has gone so far?

01:34:26 ◼   ► I think overall good.

01:34:28 ◼   ► It's very limited, of course, with Kickstarter backers.

01:34:32 ◼   ► It wasn't, honestly, it wasn't really ready when I opened it up to Kickstarter backers.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Like, it needed probably a few more weeks, at least, of baking.

01:34:41 ◼   ► And there were bugs and there were issues.

01:34:45 ◼   ► And so I'm obviously really glad that it was limited to a smaller audience.

01:34:49 ◼   ► But I feel like we've worked through a bunch of those.

01:34:51 ◼   ► I feel like it still has,

01:34:53 ◼   ► there's still a bunch of things to improve.

01:34:55 ◼   ► And, you know, there's a bunch for me to work on

01:34:59 ◼   ► before the public launch.

01:35:00 ◼   ► But overall, I think it's good.

01:35:02 ◼   ► And I think it's resonating with certain people.

01:35:04 ◼   ► You know, some people don't get it and that's okay.

01:35:06 ◼   ► But some people are excited about it

01:35:08 ◼   ► and kind of get the potential

01:35:10 ◼   ► for what it's trying to do with blogs.

01:35:12 ◼   ► - Now, one of the things you were able to do

01:35:14 ◼   ► through the Kickstarter, I think it was like a extra level,

01:35:17 ◼   ► but you made enough through the Kickstarter where you said,

01:35:20 ◼   ► if we hit this level, I'll hire a community,

01:35:23 ◼   ► what's Jean's title?

01:35:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, community manager was--

01:35:29 ◼   ► - You hired the great Jean McDonald of,

01:35:32 ◼   ► formerly at Smile Software, AppCamp for Girls co-founder,

01:35:37 ◼   ► and all-around amazing person.

01:35:39 ◼   ► She's, what's, community coordinator?

01:35:43 ◼   ► - I guess, so when I wrote the Kickstarter update

01:35:46 ◼   ► about halfway through talking about like a stretch goal

01:35:49 ◼   ► for the project community manager was the term I used.

01:35:53 ◼   ► Now, Jean, I mean, I didn't think I'd be so lucky

01:35:56 ◼   ► to get someone as great as her

01:35:58 ◼   ► with so much experience that she has.

01:35:59 ◼   ► So I don't know if that term is perfect anymore

01:36:03 ◼   ► for everything that I think she's gonna be able to help

01:36:06 ◼   ► with the project, but yeah, I couldn't be happier.

01:36:09 ◼   ► I mean, she's got great experience, Smile and AppCamp.

01:36:13 ◼   ► And I wanted to, I didn't want to wait to address issues

01:36:18 ◼   ► of potential just kind of hate and harassment

01:36:22 ◼   ► and the kind of problems that we see

01:36:25 ◼   ► almost kind of run unchecked sometimes on Twitter.

01:36:27 ◼   ► I mean, I don't completely blame Twitter for some of that,

01:36:31 ◼   ► but I do kind of blame them for not trying to work

01:36:35 ◼   ► on that stuff earlier.

01:36:36 ◼   ► And so my thought is start earlier,

01:36:40 ◼   ► try to get out in front of those kinds of issues.

01:36:42 ◼   ► and then it won't blow up into a huge problem

01:36:44 ◼   ► because it's very difficult after it becomes a problem.

01:36:47 ◼   ► And like I said, I don't completely blame Twitter

01:36:49 ◼   ► because it's hard for them to solve now.

01:36:51 ◼   ► If they had started earlier,

01:36:53 ◼   ► maybe it wouldn't be quite as bad.

01:36:55 ◼   ► - It's like any kind of infestation.

01:36:58 ◼   ► The earlier you can address it, the better.

01:37:01 ◼   ► Or even if you're redoing your patio or your deck,

01:37:10 ◼   ► If you make sure that the door closes with a good seal

01:37:13 ◼   ► to keep ants out, it's better to do it now

01:37:16 ◼   ► than to wait 'til you've got an ant infestation

01:37:19 ◼   ► in your house.

01:37:20 ◼   ► And I don't know, I think Twitter sort of,

01:37:23 ◼   ► I know people there, and I know that there's,

01:37:26 ◼   ► I don't think there's a single person at the company

01:37:27 ◼   ► who's happy about the abuse that takes place

01:37:30 ◼   ► on the platform, but I think that they've chalked it up

01:37:33 ◼   ► to, ah, we'll fix it eventually.

01:37:35 ◼   ► But once it takes root, it's a lot harder to take care of.

01:37:39 ◼   ► So I think it was very smart for you to treat this as a,

01:37:44 ◼   ► hey, here's something that's on my plate

01:37:46 ◼   ► while it's still a Kickstarter.

01:37:48 ◼   ► And it's an idea in my head,

01:37:50 ◼   ► as opposed to waiting until it might be too late.

01:37:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, and because some of these things

01:37:55 ◼   ► need to be addressed through design and features,

01:37:59 ◼   ► not just hiring more people to police tweets, right?

01:38:03 ◼   ► So there's some things inherent in how Twitter works

01:38:07 ◼   ► with reposting, with hashtags and search and trending.

01:38:11 ◼   ► There's a lot of areas where people

01:38:16 ◼   ► will get attention that they don't want,

01:38:19 ◼   ► is I guess a simplified way to put it.

01:38:21 ◼   ► And so it's almost impossible to change some of those.

01:38:23 ◼   ► There's like fundamental ways that Twitter works.

01:38:26 ◼   ► And sometimes those are great things.

01:38:28 ◼   ► Like I said, I tried to highlight when I left Twitter,

01:38:32 ◼   ► like some of the great things that Twitter enables,

01:38:34 ◼   ► but sometimes not good things happen

01:38:37 ◼   ► because of the way features work.

01:38:38 ◼   ► So with Micro.bo, I didn't wanna just copy

01:38:42 ◼   ► every Twitter feature.

01:38:43 ◼   ► I wanted to think about every single feature,

01:38:47 ◼   ► every part of the UI, the design of the app,

01:38:50 ◼   ► just to see if it would be one of those things

01:38:54 ◼   ► where people could be harassed, for example.

01:38:57 ◼   ► And so it is, again, back to basics, it's limited

01:39:01 ◼   ► and we'll be adding more features,

01:39:02 ◼   ► but there's some things we won't add

01:39:04 ◼   ► because I feel like they encourage bad behavior.

01:39:07 ◼   ► - So one of the things that's interesting about it

01:39:09 ◼   ► is that it's like Twitter,

01:39:12 ◼   ► a micro.blog post has just one text field.

01:39:15 ◼   ► You just type in it and then you hit post

01:39:17 ◼   ► and it's posted so you don't have to come up with a title.

01:39:19 ◼   ► In fact, you can't, there are no titles.

01:39:22 ◼   ► - Right.

01:39:23 ◼   ► - I think you're exactly right,

01:39:26 ◼   ► you mentioned this a couple minutes ago,

01:39:27 ◼   ► where I think that that's so freeing in some ways,

01:39:32 ◼   ► And I often think about it with email, where I don't like to half-ass my subjects, but

01:39:38 ◼   ► there's a lot of times where I'll sit there and stare at the subject and I think,

01:39:42 ◼   ► "You know what?

01:39:43 ◼   ► Screw it.

01:39:44 ◼   ► I'll just hit them up on iMessage instead," because then I don't have to come up with

01:39:46 ◼   ► the subject.

01:39:48 ◼   ► It's a weird psychological barrier.

01:39:52 ◼   ► I would never think to do a site like Daring Fireball without titles, because that's

01:39:57 ◼   ► my job, and it's something I take very carefully.

01:40:02 ◼   ► So I don't mind the formality of always having a title.

01:40:06 ◼   ► And I don't really expose them.

01:40:08 ◼   ► But all 17 years worth of-- or however long,

01:40:14 ◼   ► 15 years of daring fireball posts--

01:40:16 ◼   ► have tags with categories and stuff like that.

01:40:19 ◼   ► I don't mind that because I feel like, hey, this is my job.

01:40:23 ◼   ► I should straighten up, smooth out the wrinkles in my shirt,

01:40:26 ◼   ► make sure I don't have crumbs on my face.

01:40:28 ◼   ► Whereas when I'm just shooting off at the hip on Twitter,

01:40:30 ◼   ► Who gives a shit?

01:40:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, and different kind of workflows

01:40:36 ◼   ► work for different people.

01:40:38 ◼   ► And I think that for some people that's totally fine,

01:40:42 ◼   ► just like throw out whatever thing on Twitter.

01:40:45 ◼   ► But there's a lot of people that I think would benefit

01:40:48 ◼   ► from maybe a little thinking about it a little bit

01:40:51 ◼   ► before they post something.

01:40:55 ◼   ► - Maybe like our president?

01:40:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:40:57 ◼   ► Just say him.

01:40:58 ◼   ► - Maybe, maybe just a little.

01:41:00 ◼   ► But anyway, blogging should be easier, it should be as easy as Twitter.

01:41:05 ◼   ► You should still think about what you're posting.

01:41:07 ◼   ► But for some people they don't care if it lasts, they don't care if it's searchable or they can find it again.

01:41:13 ◼   ► But for other people the idea that even if I'm just like this quick comment or joke on Twitter, even that is worth keeping.

01:41:21 ◼   ► It's worth having my own domain name, it's worth being able to find later and link to.

01:41:26 ◼   ► And so it just depends. That's what you want to get out of it.

01:41:29 ◼   ► want to get out of it. So differences between micro dot blog and twitter, one of them

01:41:34 ◼   ► and again full circle comes to one of our creations. You support markdown for

01:41:38 ◼   ► text formatting, which I've seen people suggest that twitter should

01:41:43 ◼   ► do. And I kind of think that they can't now. There's no way that they can like

01:41:48 ◼   ► there's a sort of expectation in twitter that if you type an asterisk and then a word

01:41:53 ◼   ► and then another asterisk that you're going to see the asterisks, you know, uh yeah,

01:41:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, it might be too late.

01:41:59 ◼   ► - But you also have--

01:42:00 ◼   ► - And the idea there is just like,

01:42:01 ◼   ► tweets are fine, I guess.

01:42:03 ◼   ► But like, if you look at a short tweet-like post,

01:42:08 ◼   ► and instead of having like a bunch of URLs

01:42:11 ◼   ► at the end of it or something,

01:42:12 ◼   ► if it has inline links and maybe something's in bold,

01:42:16 ◼   ► like look at both of those side to side

01:42:19 ◼   ► and it looks really great.

01:42:21 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:42:22 ◼   ► - Like it just really looks nice

01:42:24 ◼   ► when you use like just simple markdown

01:42:26 ◼   ► And it just, when you're scrolling through your timeline and something's in bold and then there's an

01:42:31 ◼   ► inline link or something, it just looks really nice.

01:42:33 ◼   ► And you don't have to, you know, do a microblog post that way, but you can.

01:42:37 ◼   ► I think it just adds something, a kind of a clarity to the

01:42:42 ◼   ► timeline.

01:42:43 ◼   ► There's an underappreciated aspect to writing for the web.

01:42:46 ◼   ► And I maybe somebody has written about it in a way, but I've never seen it, but

01:42:52 ◼   ► it's like just implicit rather than explicitly talked about.

01:42:56 ◼   ► And I certainly don't think anybody learns about it

01:42:58 ◼   ► in school, even though I think it should be taught

01:43:00 ◼   ► the same way other forms of grammar are,

01:43:01 ◼   ► which is where do you put a link?

01:43:04 ◼   ► What words do you use for the link

01:43:06 ◼   ► when you're linking to something?

01:43:07 ◼   ► I think very carefully about it every time

01:43:09 ◼   ► I put a link in my writing, like which words.

01:43:12 ◼   ► And it bothers me sometimes, and I often notice it

01:43:15 ◼   ► in like articles at like a old,

01:43:18 ◼   ► long-standing print publication, like a newspaper,

01:43:21 ◼   ► where if the New York Times is writing about something

01:43:25 ◼   ► Washington Post reported it first. They'll say this was first reported in an article by the

01:43:29 ◼   ► Washington Post, and they'll make the link just the word article. And I think, no, it should be

01:43:33 ◼   ► like article by the Washington Post. Like add a couple more words to that link.

01:43:37 ◼   ► Yeah. I wonder if they're almost trying to hide the link.

01:43:42 ◼   ► That's what I think. No, that's exactly what I read into that, though. I read at this meta level

01:43:48 ◼   ► when I see the links, and I think, oh, they're, you know, they're, that's exactly what I think.

01:43:52 ◼   ► I think that's sort of like, you know, they're throwing shade on them by making the link as

01:43:57 ◼   ► short as possible. Like, all right, we'll give you credit for this, but we're going to make it

01:44:00 ◼   ► as inconspicuous as possible. And I do think that I think that we've, in some ways, we've gone

01:44:08 ◼   ► backwards with these posting formats like Twitter and Facebook, where if you want to have a URL,

01:44:14 ◼   ► you have to show the whole URL.

01:44:16 ◼   ► It's not that-- there were some people who've

01:44:22 ◼   ► pushed for URLs being completely hidden,

01:44:25 ◼   ► and the way that browsers have sort of-- they still

01:44:28 ◼   ► haven't done away with them entirely.

01:44:30 ◼   ► But Safari typically just shows your domain name

01:44:36 ◼   ► in the location field until you click in the location field,

01:44:38 ◼   ► and then it shows the whole URL.

01:44:40 ◼   ► They've slowly but surely made them,

01:44:42 ◼   ► tried to make them less of a user-facing thing.

01:44:47 ◼   ► But we've ended up in this world where

01:44:49 ◼   ► when you share URLs on Twitter and stuff like that,

01:44:52 ◼   ► you have to see the whole ugly thing.

01:44:53 ◼   ► And so many people have CMS systems

01:44:56 ◼   ► that generate these ugly URLs.

01:44:58 ◼   ► And even if you don't have ugly URLs, all of these people

01:45:01 ◼   ► now post these UTM turds for SEO tracking

01:45:06 ◼   ► or whatever the hell they're for.

01:45:07 ◼   ► And so the URLs have gotten uglier over time,

01:45:11 ◼   ► and we're stuck looking at them.

01:45:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and Twitter tries to clean them up a little bit,

01:45:17 ◼   ► like truncate's part of them, but yeah,

01:45:20 ◼   ► it can get really, a lot of clutter.

01:45:23 ◼   ► - Very clutter, and just being able to do square bracket,

01:45:27 ◼   ► end square bracket, put the URL in parentheses afterwards,

01:45:30 ◼   ► and then have it render just as a nice word.

01:45:34 ◼   ► Like, who would have thought in 1996 that in 2017

01:45:38 ◼   ► we'd be saying, you know what's nice?

01:45:39 ◼   ► It's a blocking system where you can make links.

01:45:42 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:45:44 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like something that we would be praising

01:45:48 ◼   ► a new blocking platform for in 2017, but there it is.

01:45:53 ◼   ► And that's the thing.

01:45:53 ◼   ► - It's the basis for the entire web.

01:45:55 ◼   ► - Right.

01:45:56 ◼   ► - I mean.

01:45:58 ◼   ► - And like, if there's one theme that underscores

01:46:00 ◼   ► a lot of what we've talked about today,

01:46:02 ◼   ► it's like, things should be better.

01:46:03 ◼   ► Like we deserve a better web by now, right?

01:46:06 ◼   ► And like, I think Twitter should have evolved

01:46:09 ◼   ► more quickly, they ran into issues and leadership changes

01:46:13 ◼   ► and whatnot and that happens, but it should be better.

01:46:17 ◼   ► Feed readers should, I mean feed readers should

01:46:19 ◼   ► in some cases work, should embrace ideas

01:46:22 ◼   ► from social networks.

01:46:23 ◼   ► And yeah, so there's progress to be made

01:46:26 ◼   ► and I'm excited for that because what Brent said

01:46:30 ◼   ► about these themes in his life of working on an outliner,

01:46:34 ◼   ► writing on his blog, these things that last

01:46:38 ◼   ► and he's still happy doing 20 years later.

01:46:41 ◼   ► I feel the same way about blogging.

01:46:42 ◼   ► I can't believe actually it took me this long

01:46:44 ◼   ► to build a blogging platform.

01:46:45 ◼   ► I probably should have built one a long time ago.

01:46:48 ◼   ► But I'm glad that there's still unsolved problems.

01:46:50 ◼   ► There's still room for improvement.

01:46:52 ◼   ► - I think that I don't wanna be too melodramatic,

01:46:55 ◼   ► but I feel like Google Reader was a catastrophe

01:46:59 ◼   ► in the sense of the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs

01:47:04 ◼   ► a couple hundred million years ago.

01:47:06 ◼   ► Google Reader became so popular and so central.

01:47:10 ◼   ► And it was even-- because it was central and it had APIs,

01:47:13 ◼   ► it was-- even for people who didn't look at Google Reader,

01:47:16 ◼   ► like NetNewswire had to support it as the syncing engine.

01:47:20 ◼   ► I'm looking at NetNewswire, but it's

01:47:22 ◼   ► using Google Reader behind the scenes

01:47:24 ◼   ► to do the syncing so that an app on my iPhone

01:47:27 ◼   ► can see the same read on read status

01:47:29 ◼   ► and have the same subscription feeds.

01:47:31 ◼   ► And when Google Reader went away,

01:47:33 ◼   ► it did so much damage to the open web.

01:47:36 ◼   ► And it's our own fault for letting the open web become

01:47:39 ◼   ► so dependent on one centralized proprietary thing

01:47:43 ◼   ► from a company.

01:47:44 ◼   ► Like the open web thrives when there's multiplicity.

01:47:49 ◼   ► But it is funny, though.

01:47:50 ◼   ► I feel like in hindsight, it was bad for the web

01:47:54 ◼   ► that Google Reader went away.

01:47:55 ◼   ► And I've said it before, traffic during Fireball plummeted.

01:47:58 ◼   ► I mean, I lost 25% of my page views per month just like that,

01:48:03 ◼   ► just gone.

01:48:03 ◼   ► And it never returned.

01:48:05 ◼   ► Luckily, I don't think readership is down.

01:48:07 ◼   ► I just think the number of times a day

01:48:09 ◼   ► that people came to the site went down

01:48:11 ◼   ► because Google Reader was their way

01:48:12 ◼   ► to get notified when something new was posted.

01:48:16 ◼   ► Thankfully, I never monetized the site by page views.

01:48:20 ◼   ► It was always based on how many people

01:48:22 ◼   ► and what I could charge sponsors per week.

01:48:23 ◼   ► But other sites that had page view-based things

01:48:26 ◼   ► lost 25% of their revenue just like that.

01:48:31 ◼   ► But much like the catastrophe of the meteor,

01:48:34 ◼   ► There has been an awful lot,

01:48:37 ◼   ► like there's so many more feed syncing services now

01:48:40 ◼   ► than there were when Google Reader went away.

01:48:42 ◼   ► Just quietly, the feed, I don't want to say industry

01:48:47 ◼   ► because that's the wrong word,

01:48:48 ◼   ► but the community surrounding feeds

01:48:50 ◼   ► has sort of routed around that,

01:48:52 ◼   ► and it's good that there's so many options now

01:48:54 ◼   ► for things like syncing feeds.

01:48:56 ◼   ► I don't know if you guys agree. - Yeah, definitely.

01:49:00 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's kind of like,