Themes…
The Local East Village launched since our last show, and Dave re-introduced hi aggregator for East Village feeds, http://east-village.org/.
Last week, Dave asked Jay what his problem with public radio’s Marketplace program was. Jay wrote about it.
What to do about comments.
Dave has been running a series at Scripting News: Rebooting RSS. It started with How to Reboot RSS.. Jay: “I especially liked The Architecture of RSS.”
NewTwitter has been rolling out. Dave and Jay both have it now. And what’s distinctive about it? The signs of Twitter moving into place to become a media company, a seller of attention.
And along those lines…. “Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die.” So says a former Twitter developer, Alex Payne, who was responsible for the developers platform. A key passage:
A large part of the reason I left Twitter was a fundamental philosophical difference that I couldn’t reconcile, either for myself or the company. I believe that Twitter as a medium is and should be distinct from Twitter as a business. Put another way, there’s an important difference between lowercase “t” tweeting and uppercase “T” Twitter, just as with democrat and Democrat.
This is not a new sentiment. Others have expressed it for years, in calls for a decentralized Twitter and attempts to build just that. For a time, I dismissed those missives as faxes from the crazy uncle lunatic fringe of the Internet technology community: the standardsistas, the neckbeards, the open sorcerers, the people who believe that all things must be free and open regardless of context. I came to the conclusion on a different path, but I came to it nonetheless.
- When you don’t own the platform, or you’re not in a situation where no one owns the platform: Seattle Times Describes Difficulty in Getting Huskies iPhone App Approved.
“It’s quite a new experience to cede control over distribution to an organization that we can’t even talk to. As anyone who has produced an iPhone app knows, once the code is finished, you go through a detailed process of submission to the Apple store online. And then you wait.
“In our case, it took five full working days for an Apple reviewer to even look at our app. That much we expected. But when the reviewer rejected our app, we were surprised and bewildered. One issue had to do with Apple’s disclaimer requirements for promotional sweepstakes or contests in apps.
“The other — more troubling — issue concerned ‘features, namely team logos and terminology in the application name and keywords, that infringe on rights owned by NCAA.’ We had used team logos and the word ‘husky’ in contexts identical to ones we commonly use in print and online, and we felt we were fully within our rights to use them as we had in the app.”
It goes on and on. Clearly, Apple has them by the cojones. And everything will be done on Apple’s time. Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News reported last week some speculation that Apple may want from publishers 30 percent of subscription revenue and 40 percent of ad revenue for iPad apps.
