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Social Media Cyborg

2011-11-04T21:12:34+00:00

TL;DR: Since Google Reader lost it's sharing, I've decided to revisit my "social media strategy". I'm plugging lots of things into other things. I feel like maybe I should write about this stuff.

Started diagramming all my social media flows on LucidChart.

This is what I do for fun

Since I've mentioned in a few places that I'm a weirdo, I thought I might spend some time explaining exactly what I mean by that. You see, one of my hobbies is turning myself into a human content filter for friends on the web.

And, honestly, having my sharing habits shaken up by the Readerpocalypse makes it fun again.

The image over to the right is an attempt I made to diagram some of my social media flow. It's incomplete, though: I'm a cheapsake and ran out of free objects in my diagram. So, I had to leave out at least a half-dozen more services and a dozen additional connections. (LucidChart is very nice, by the way.)

In other words, ifttt.com is awesome

In particular, I've finally spent some time with ifttt.com. It's like Automator for the social web. It lets you define event triggers from one site that cause actions on another site.

So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible:

Pinboard bookmarks based on favorites from Twitter, identi.ca, YouTube, Last.fm, and my Kindle highlights. I'm turning my Pinboard account into both my personal social media archive and a Google Reader sharing replacement, and I don't even have to beg for new features at Pinboard.
Tumblr photo posts based on Reddit up-votes, Flickr favorites, and Pinboard bookmarks tagged "to:tumblr". Since creating it, I've left my Tumblr almost entirely neglected—but now with ifttt.com, I can route almost every nifty image I find over to that thing. It's the right side of my outboard brain to the Pinboard left.
Published items from from my private installation of Tiny Tiny RSS end up shared on Pinboard. This pretty much scratches my itch for feed reader sharing, since Google nixed those features from Reader.
Starred items from tt-rss get sent to Instapaper, so I can read them on my Kindle later. If email delivery of documents start working, then I'll have a personal long-attention span newspaper delivered regularly to that gadget.
Posts from Google+ get copied over to Facebook, because I don't want to pick sides.
In fact, almost everything I do everywhere eventually ends up posted to Facebook, because I almost never post anything in person over there. I do have friends and family over there and respond to comments, though.

What's the point?

The important principle here is that I'm lazy. If there's a single button to click somewhere that expresses my happiness about a thing, I'd like to click it and have that happiness shared and archived elsewhere without me doing much (or anything) more. The scheme I have now feels pretty good for that, and ifttt.com does a huge amount to help.

The other important thing is that I am at the center of these connections. I don't live entirely on any single service, and anything I care about is archived where I can easily grab it for backups or mashups. Should any particular service node in this web fail, I can probably do without, find an alternative, or build one myself.

My goal is to eventually replace as many of these nodes as possible with self-hosted or at least Open Source derived services. (Though, of course, I'm also lazy and my friends are where they are. So, that goal will take awhile.)

One more thing...

I've got an idea for my next book simmering. And, since I've so far managed to write books about the major things I've done for fun, I feel I'd be remiss if I skipped this stuff. I mean, I sort of covered the same ground all in my first and second books, but things have progressed since then.

What this means is that all the above feels like a warm up for the coding and prosing I'll need to do. I just need to get my shit together and carve out the time to make it happen.

The Readerpocalypse, or Occupy Google Reader

2011-11-01T10:31:54+00:00

TL;DR: Google gave Reader a face-lift and removed built-in following & sharing. In exchange, they added +1 buttons and ways to share to Google+. But, the changes seem to have removed most of the value from the service for me, so I'm moving on as I was invited to do.

What happened?

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how my habits had gotten less del.icio.us. One of the main culprits that stole my sharing flow was Google Reader: I went from using a quick bookmarklet to an even quicker icon-click in my feed reader. That meant I left most things untagged, but I shared even more than before. Eventually, Google Reader released a bookmarklet for use off-site, which meant I started sharing everything everywhere to Reader.

I also found a replacement for my old del.icio.us network in Google Reader's social features. I could follow people, and the stream of things they shared and annotated turned into a great source of news curated and pre-filtered by likeminded people.

Well, as it turns out, Google's recent changes to Reader just removed all of the above. In exchange, they added a couple of buttons to +1 and share items to Google+, which streamlines things for them and encourages more use of the new service.

As I wrote on Google+, the net result is nothing to stomp and shout about, but there's nothing there that makes me happier. As I played more, though, I came to realize that most of the value I derived from the service had evaporated.

Item-centric vs People-centric, Efficiency vs Engagement

There's a big difference between the way sharing happened on Google Reader, and the way it happens now on Google+. The best way I can think to explain is that the old way was item-centric and the new way is people-centric. In other words, people seem to be the dominant social objects in Google+, whereas Google Reader used to treat items that way.

Before, we all gathered around the news. The headline and summary were primary, and our comments were collected after the item. The result was a de-duped stream of great news filtered through smart brains. Even if the people I followed never said a word, the fact that they'd clicked "share" was value enough. In fact, it was better that way most of the time, because we all got out of the way of each other and the news.

This, by the way, is what I loved about del.icio.us and now pinboard.in: It's anti-social networking. We can provide low-effort, intelligent inputs to build something useful for each other, but we're not there to assert a presence or distract each other from the things we each came to see.

But now, that filtered news stream is gone. In its place, on a different site entirely, removed from the flow of feeding on news, is a highly-engaging flood of people babbling away, which occasionally includes repeated shares of things that have bubbled up during the day.

What's wrong with that, for me?

I don't want to wade through a heavily-padded, user-friendly flood of duplicated, echoed items.
I don't want to engage with the people—at least, not when I'm in a mood to feed on news. I want to catch up on what's been put out into the infosphere already, and then start talking about it.

The design of Google+—which has spilled over into the Google Reader face-lift—is about engagement and not fast & efficient processing of the day's news. Engagement in general puts a drag on the task—which for me is like a GTD, Inbox Zero, headline skimming, pattern recognition zen thing that might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But, for all I know, avowed weirdo and info freako that I am, these changes may drive Google Reader growth through the roof for mainstream users. But, it's no longer a product for me. The changes in sharing have removed most of the value for me, because I no longer have the warp speed cruise through news that other people used to power for me.

Circles point the wrong way

One of the things Louis Gray touted about the new sharing features reads like so:

In Reader’s previous sharing model, as a follower of your items, I would see every single item you shared, no matter what it was about. Obviously, as I have different interests than you do, not everything you shared was something I cared about, which often led to reduced sharing of off-topic content. Now, you are more in control, so you can share sports items to your sports circles, great recipes with your foodies circle, or local news to family and friends. You can keep sharing, like you always have, but now, you can better select who sees what.

But, for this purpose, Circles point the wrong way.

Circles on Google+ are lists of people controlled by me. They're not topics—again, people-centric and not item-centric. Circles are a targeting mechanism for sharing to people, and a filtering mechanism for items from people. That is, I can use a circle to set who sees something and I can decide who's stuff I see and when.

But, things that Circles don't do include:

Letting me follow Circles without the Circle-owner needing to manage membership - eg. Don't make me send a message saying "I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter". RSS doesn't work that way and it's better for it.
Letting me and others filter for what gets sent to specific Circles - eg. I'm in both your "scifi" and "politics" circles, but just show me what you sent to your "scifi" circle.

Google Reader didn't have this to begin with, but what I'm looking for is an equivalent to tagging on pinboard.in. For example, if you like my taste in scifi but could care less about my views in politics, you can subscribe to just the tag feeds you want.

I'm happy to tag my shares with topics; that's beneficial to me for search later, and helps interested people besides. But, the last thing I want to do is manage subscriber lists. That doesn't scale. There's no way for you to even know I have "scifi" or "politics" Circles, and you have no way to join either of them without asking for an add.

Too much coordination, not enough benefit. I just can't see the value in people-centric Circles here.

Other things broke, too.

And beyond the fundamental shift in sharing and reading, these things have broken for me now too:

The bookmarklet is dead, so there goes my off-site sharing.
No sharing at all from the mobile web version, so there goes at least half of my sharing on-site.
Android apps like my favorite gReader Pro still think sharing works, but they're just deluded and use an unsupported API anyway
No more feed to Facebook, so there goes most of my Facebook output. (Though, that might be a boon some friends over there.)

Now what?

The remaining value of Google Reader is as just a plain old hosted feed reader—one of the last of them out there, in fact. The problem here is that I'm a weirdo who wrote a book on feeds and feed readers, and so I'm perfectly capable of providing the remaining value for myself.

I'm sure most people won't want to do that, which is probably why "you're not going anywhere". But, there are alternatives even for people who don't want to D.I.Y. entirely:

Dave Winer's River2 (also open source, in UserTalk on the OPML Editor) runs on my laptop and lets me circle back to the code that ran my second-ever news reader, Radio UserLand. (My first was a thing called News Clipper in Perl from many, many moons ago.) And, of course, River2 is one of a suite of apps Dave's working on to build a decentrallized network of feeds and outlines.
NewsBlur looks mighty fine, and the guy running it only asks US$12-36 (your choice) for a year's worth of premium access. Remember: if you're not the customer, you're the product. And, if you want to try installing it, it's an open source Django site. While not yet very social, NewsBlur's creator has plans to head in that direction.
Tiny Tiny RSS installed on my Wordpress-capable web server in about 10 minutes, gobbled up my list of 800 feeds with no problem, and appears to have 90% of what I wanted from Google Reader. Also, it's an open source PHP site. For sharing, Tiny Tiny RSS lets you "publish" shared items in an RSS feed—kind of like the old reBlog web app—and has some experimental cross-instance sharing features.

At the end, the funny thing is that I've circled back to my old del.icio.us habits and have started tagging items on pinboard.in like never before. I'm sure there aren't nearly as many people watching me as before on either del.icio.us or Google Reader, but it's a place to go at least.

It'll probably be recognized as an illness someday, but my sharing feels compulsive at this point and I get itchy without a good outlet.

Putting clouds in boxes for webdevs at Mozilla

2011-10-02T22:45:37+00:00

TL;DR: At Mozilla, we're redoubling efforts to attract contributors. And, in the Webdev team, we're using virtual machines to make it even easier to get started hacking. It makes no sense to demand that a JavaScript ninja or a CSS artisan also be a Python-wielding sysadmin, so we're trying to build ready-baked VMs for our projects.

Lieferung 3 by erix on Flickr

Firefox is more than just a desktop browser, and Mozilla is more than just Firefox. An ever-growing mass of our code is going toward building web sites and services that build, ship, update, support, promote, augment, document, sync, share, identify, and report. (And I'm sure I'm missing a further cast of hundreds, here.)

Sighting storm clouds on the horizon

In other words, more and more of Mozilla is in the cloud. Unfortunately, many of these projects are really hard to get into as a contributor. It's often hard to find what needs doing in Bugzilla, and it's often hard to get the code up and running in a meaningful way without being both a bit of a sysadmin and a Mozilla insider.

This is a huge problem. Although Mozilla has a core group of employees, we're not nearly enough to build all of these projects and pursue the mission on our own. We've gotten to where we are thanks to the volunteer efforts of thousands of contributors—and the only way we'll get where we want to go is through the efforts of thousands (or millions) more. The good news is that is feels like we're waking up to this problem and starting to get really serious about it.

Sharing recipes for fluffy clouds

For my part, I've spent idle time over the past few years trying to work out how to make webdev projects more accessible to new contributors. We've come a long way from the days of just uploading WordPress to an FTP server; these things come with a lot of moving parts nowadays, and the INSTALL.txt files run long and consume weekends. And so, they filter out all but the most dedicated (or masochistic) volunteers.

For months, I spun my wheels playing with virtual machines and exporting appliances, doing a lot of things by hand. But then, earlier this year, I discovered both Vagrant and Puppet and had my mind blown. With those tools, I could share recipes for VMs right alongside my code.

I would never have to set up a webdev environment for myself by hand again—all the fiddly bits of installation and configuration could be codified, checked into github, and flushed from my brain. But, the real magic is that I could share this stuff. So, future coworkers and collaborators could benefit from the same reproducible dev enviroments—never having wasted brainpower and weekends on an INSTALL.txt to begin with.

This is a really big deal. I presented on it this past June at Open Source Bridge in Portland (slides). I've been talking myself blue about this stuff for months, in opposition to my usual serially enthuastic habits. But, it looks like I've infected my coworkers at Mozilla, because now we're talking about developing with Vagrant, Puppet, and Playdoh.

No assembly required

So, with Vagrant, Puppet, and Playdoh, we'll have projects that you can fire up with just a git clone and a vagrant up in a command line shell. Forget about MacPorts or Homebrew on Mac OS X, or whatever it is that people using Windows have to install. Take a bike ride or go to lunch, and you'll have a fully configured server running and source code ready for hacking.

I think we can do better, though. For one, spinning up a fairly complex virtual machine from scratch with Vagrant and Puppet takes a long time and a lot of bandwidth. This can be sped up by packaging pre-built boxes. So, one improvement we can pursue is to spin up VMs with Vagrant as a part of our continual integration and deployment processes and package boxes for public download. These are also handy on a thumb drive for sharing at hack events and meetups.

This still requires Vagrant and working with the command-line, though. Not everyone who has something valuable to contribute is a command-line jockey. And, a few of us webdevs have run into issues with Vagrant—it's still early days for that project, after all. Additionally, not everyone who could be a Mozilla contributor owns the kind of hardware necessary to support running a substantial virtual machine.

So, I've also started playing with Puppet by itself, to build plain-vanilla VM appliances and to spin up cloud servers on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers. It's going pretty well, and it's conceivable we could do without Vagrant to script the build of downloadable VM appliances and to spin up disposable cloud servers.

So, now what?

There are still some issues to be worked out, so I've started a wiki page. And, we need to spread the word that we're doing this to see what people think—and more importantly, see if this helps attract more help. From my years at Mozilla so far and bouncing between projects, VM appliances are things I wish I'd had when faced with a new project. So, having been there—albeit with insider advantages—I'm pretty optimistic that this is a good step forward.

Of course, it's not the only step: The other thing I mentioned—and have conveniently avoided addressing again throughout the rest of this post—is the issue of finding things to do in Bugzilla. Well, we're working on that too. It's a bit beyond the scope of this blog post, but we have a Mozilla-wide effort to start classifying good first bugs for new contributors and identifying mentors to contact for help.

So... what do you think?

Badger 2: Return of the Mustelidae

2011-07-18T15:03:13+00:00

TL;DR: A year ago, I said I wanted to build a badging service for the Mozilla community, so we could all celebrate how awesome we all are. Well, I putzed around and didn't get far, so I'm starting over with something more immediately useful.

(This is an awesome illustration by Sean Martell, used entirely without permission. I'll take it down if anyone gets mad.)

Almost a year ago, I wrote about building a badging service for all of Mozilla.

In a nutshell, I left the 2010 Mozilla Summit wanting to build a tool that empowered people to craft social objects representing achievement and gratitude, and give them to each other.

Since then, I've played around with a prototype in Django with Pinax. But, I abandoned that thing due to getting super busy with the Firefox 4 release. It also didn't help that I was a Django newb and that I got caught up in screwing around with shiny things like Pinax and Lettuce and neglected the actual feature set.

So now, finally, I'm picking the thread back up again. This time, with a little less ambition and a few more practical aims.

Make something more useful right away

While I have spent some dangerous time screwing around with shinies like Vagrant, Puppet, and Playdoh, I think I've gotten that mostly out of my system and have gotten down to work as of last night.

Rather than build a Grand Central Station for badges, I've reset my goals to a progression of practical results:

Build a reusable Django app that supports some basic use cases of creating and awarding badges to users.
Add Activity Streams narrating badge claims
Add support for PubSubHubbub with Badger activity streams
Add a REST API, maybe with OAuth
Accept badges for local users, via PuSH from external sites
See what the Open Badges Project is up to, and how Badger can fit in with their goals.

The idea here is to make Badger a practical, reusable, drop-in app for existing sites—preferably (but not necessarily) the Playdoh-flavored sites we're building at Mozilla. Then, incrementally and optionally empower a Badger-enabled site to become a badge hub by accepting reports of badge claims from other Badger-enabled sites.

Take baby steps to federation

So, for example, let's say we dropped Badger into a few sites like these:

At first, Badger would just augment those sites with badging facilities for their respective user bases. That could fill some needs right away.

Then, say we built a site that offered personal profiles to members of the Mozilla community. With the Activity Stream and PuSH augmentations, users could connect their profiles with each of the other Mozilla sites they use. That way, whenever they claim a badge out there, it gets delivered to their community profile.

Why bother federating at all?

If the only cross-site goal to build an all-in-one display case for badges on a community profile, I could just build JSON feeds and wrap them in a JS-based widget. In fact, a JSON-formatted Activity Stream will work nicely for that. Drop that into the profile page, and we're done.

There are lots of reasons to federate. But, at least one thing not supported by this solution are meta-badges. That is, badges awarded for badges.

Let's say you close 100 bugs on Bugzilla, answer 100 questions on SUMO, edit 100 pages of documentation on MDN, and author 100 add-ons. And, let's say you get badges on the respective sites for all of those activities.

Well, now, I'd like to give you a badge on your community profile for being a Mozilla Superhero. I could just do that by hand, having observed all your greatness. But, I'd rather the system just do that automatically.

If your community profile treated all your badges from your chosen affiliated sites as first-class citizens, then I could build the meta-badge trigger right there.

Of course, I could also write a program that monitors badge feeds from various sites. Then, use the community profile site's Badger API to issue a badge when the conditions are met. But, as maintainer of the monitoring program, I'd have to keep track of what feeds where count for which people, which could be a mess.

There's still some thinking to do here.

What about identity and co-opting badges?

I'm still thinking through how someone connects a profile to other sites. As in, how can Badger ensure that the owner of the community profile is also the owner of a badge claim feed on MDN? Maybe some kind of OAuth dance that results in a PuSH subscription between sites?

Consider the least-capable federation case: a Badger-compatible feed hosted as a static file on Amazon S3. And, by Badger-compatible, I mean an Activity Stream that contains badge claims. You shouldn't need my specific implementation of Badger-in-Django to produce one of those.

Although PuSH is still the ideal case (I think), occasional polling of an Activity Stream feed should still be supported. If a user connects that up to their community profile, we just have to take their word for it. We'd rely on community members to flag stinkers trying to claim badge feeds that aren't theirs.

Beyond that, there's probably some crypto-voodoo we can invoke here, for cases where badge claim validity really matters—as opposed to the fun and games I have in mind for Mozilla.

What about the Open Badges Project?

From various conversations over the past year, it sounds to me like the Open Badges Project is getting the parts in place to do even more interesting federation of badges that gives ownership of the badge hub to the user.

In that scenario, you have a backpack in your browser and can carry your badge claims with you between sites with no prior coordination between the sites themselves.

This sounds like something in which Badger should be able to participate, eventually. If not as a hub, Badger should at least offer the tools to create and award badges that work with the user-owned hub scheme.

So, what next?

Now that I've written all this out, I need to hack on it. If you're interested in this stuff, let me know. That way, it'll look like someone might actually find this stuff handy when I get something working!

Archived Comments

David Boswell
2011-07-19T01:18:24

Very cool to see an update on Badger. I'm definitely interested in this and would love to see something like this show up in the Mozillians phonebook that will be ready soonish :) David
Brian King
2011-07-19T15:12:01

Over at the Mozilla Reps program, we are discussing the possible use of badges - https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo
Gen Kanai
2011-07-19T15:48:22

Agreed with DBos. Would love to see Badger as an official service, especially with the new Campus Reps program that Jason Haas is rebooting as well as with the Mozilla Representatives program. Also you might get a badge for contributing to the Join Mozilla program? So many great uses for us.
interstar
2011-08-05T03:15:39

Hi Les, Very very interesting. I was just thinking that there needed to be something like the Open Badges project today. (I'd even got as far as knocking up a data-model in web2py.) And then I saw this. I quickly cloned and tried out your app with an ordinary Django project but it's blowing up without jingo and I guess other Playdoh related modules. Are you committed to Playdoh for Badger2 ?
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-05T18:05:31
  
  I'm committed to Playdoh insofar as my initial users will probably be my co-workers at Mozilla, who are all building Playdoh-based sites. But, there's no reason why it shouldn't eventually work with vanilla Django. It's using core template loaders and shortcuts, so switching over to standard stuff shouldn't be an issue for the views and models. I'm hoping at some point to put together some more Django-conventional template tags and templates toward that end, unless someone gets to it before me in a pull request (patches welcome!). Really, I think the template tags are the more important thing, since any templates out of the box will likely get overridden on a real site.
Dr. Nellie Deutsch
2011-09-02T14:07:45

I love the idea, Leslie. I've been heading a self-funded organization that provides free online professional development workshops for educators around the world since 2006. We need badges for our graduates. Let me know how I can be of help.

Five years

2011-06-11T01:17:34+00:00

I proposed to her in front of the Max & Ermas where we'd had our first date. A year or so later, we got married. That was five years ago, this past Thursday.

Over these past five years, my love has put up with a lot from me. To start with, she let me drag her across the country, away from friends and family, before we'd even gotten beach sand from our honeymoon out of the luggage. She let me chase a fantasy out West without even knowing where we'd live—and she was the one who found us a home while I got started at my Silicon Valley dream job.

This has been the theme of our years together: Alexandra makes my life possible. She gives me so much happiness, support, and cares for me without question—for which I am entirely undeserving. I would be useless without her, and rediscover the fact of this on a daily basis. She enables and encourages me in so many ways, and I can only hope to return even a fraction of the favor.

Alexandra is my best friend and closest confidant. I love her as deeply as on our wedding day, and that feeling just grows stronger every day. As an introvert, I get exahusted after a day around other people, and need a day alone to recharge. Alexandra is the only person I've met who can has the opposite effect on me—we recharge each other.

Since we moved back to Michigan, making a home here has been the happiest time of my life. It's not life as I'd dreamed it would be—it's been better. And I owe it all to my gorgeous wife, Alexandra.

Archived Comments

groovecoder
2011-06-12T22:37:41

congrats man!
kosso
2011-07-02T03:51:00

*sniff* tis a beautiful thang. i miss having a great woman aside me on my life adventures. i wish some people were more easily replaceable. but their beauty is, is that they can't be. oh well. onwards. alone. for now.

Cutting the Cord (or: Bright House, you're fired)

2011-06-10T22:16:39+00:00

TL;DR: Our cable company has offered poor support for our TiVo; cut our channels and allowed our service to degrade; mislead us about possible solutions; and finally wasted our time by sending a contractor to our home instead of a clued-in employee who could handle the issue. And, now that we're going to pursue other options for putting moving pictures on our television, they plan to charge us for cutting the cord. Since I've been looking to write here more, I've just been given a nice excuse to rant.

Bright House has basically a local monopoly on cable TV here. So, we've been a customer of theirs for cable and internet over the past few years.

This is the thing, though: We've spent a lot of money on a cable subscription. In exchange, I expect great and even proactive customer service. I guess I'm unreasonable, because instead we're expected to pay more for less and to accept hassles and up-selling instead of support—because they're almost literally the only game in town. But, other options are getting good enough and we can learn to do without.

You see, we have a TiVo. We like our TiVo. We got one when the girl worked at the company, and we've never gone back. Having one is like living in the future. Yes, Bright House offers their own DVRs, but they're inferior products and we don't want one. So, as far as I'm concerned, Bright House is just a video supplier for our TiVo.

Unfortunately, over the past year, they've done a crappy job. They're transitioning to Switched Digital Video, and that's something our TiVo doesn't support out of the box. As we eventually found out, there's a tuning adapter that could fix things. But, rather than tell us about that up front—and maybe offer to send us one as a part of their transition—they've instead sent us a series of letters listing channels we're going to lose because we rent CableCARDs.

Since I've got better things to do than call the cable company, I put off contacting them. In the meantime, we lost channels as promised. Other channels not listed in the letters began to degrade and became unwatchable.

Finally, I sent an email. A week or so later, they called and left me a voicemail, which described the installation fee and monthly rental rate of a tuning adapter. This, on top of what we already pay for CableCARDs and the underlying cable service itself. At that point, we were pretty annoyed. The cable bill was already high and new fees seemed to appear every month—and they wanted us to pay even more just to get what we'd originally signed up for.

Yes, I understand that SDV will let them make more efficient use of resources and offer exciting new services and yadda yadda yadda—but, to me, it just looks like they're breaking the video feed into our TiVo and expect us to pay more to fix it. It's pretty shady and customer-hostile, this stuff. Oh wait: Didn't some of these guys get fined by the FCC for SDV hijinx not too long ago?

So, rather than jump on getting a tuning adapter installed, I bought an antenna and went retro. It turns out there are over a dozen over-the-air HD channels in range. That might not sound like a lot, but you'd be surprised how much watchable stuff is packed into the major networks versus the other 1000 channels we got on digital cable. The theme here is free and good enough.

True, some of those channels are a pain to tune in using a dinky little indoor antenna, reminicent of the "rabbit ears" days. But, for most of the past month, we got by pretty well. The TiVo works nicely with an antenna. It's a decent Netflix streamer, too. (Though, to be honest, the Xbox 360 works better, can get Hulu Plus, and plays videos from our network. TiVo really, really needs to catch up fast here.)

Having given TV a trial without cable, we decided it was time to call Bright House back to sort out this TiVo thing, one way or another. Since I'm a proven procrastinating wuss about calling the cable company, my wife called and scheduled an appointment for a tech visit.

Here's the fun part: They told her we didn't need a tuning adapter. Instead, they had "HD boxes" which would do the trick. They could install those for free, reclaim our rented CableCARDs, and we'd get a break on our bill at the end. I was dubious, but that sounded surprisingly good!

So, the tech arrived today, near the end of the 2-hour window. He came armed with two Motorola DCX3200 set-top boxes. I thought they must have some kind of control connection to be slaved to the TiVo. My cable-tech-fu is pretty weak, but I assumed they knew what they were doing.

But, no: The tech—who was a contractor and not a Bright House employee—took one look at our TiVo and shrugged. He had no idea how to make these boxes work with that thing. So, he set one up alongside the TiVo and called back to headquarters to schedule another appointment—this time with an elusive real Bright House employee who apparently knew about these things. You know, the guy whom they should have sent in the first place.

I've no real complaints about the contractor: His installation of the set-top box was fine—it was just the wrong solution altogether. Yeah, I could probably finagle something with an IR blaster, but it doesn't seem worth it and probably doesn't work in HD. We could also keep the appointment next week and hope that the bona fide Bright House employee knows what he's doing and leaves us with a working tuning adapter. But, trying to be happy about that starts to feel like Stockholm Syndrome.

After the contractor left, we thought a bit and my wife (again, because the phone is my kryptonite, and I'd be useless without her) called Bright House to cancel our cable.

We wanted to keep the internet access—but even here, they did their best to make us think twice about staying their customer at all. It turns out that to break up our cable/internet bundle, they need to "rebuild our whole system" and that incurs a fee as large as what we paid to install cable in the first place.

The funny thing is that it wouldn't have been hard to keep us happy. Do a little work up front to help keep our TiVo running, and we might have spent even more money on cable. Now, we're looking very hard at alternatives we'd been too complacent to consider before.

But, I guess that's the problem: This is all very old news. They don't really want our TiVo on their network. So, instead, they sent letters promising degraded service and followed through on it. And, when contacted to address the issue, they botched it altogether. Clearly, if third-party set-top boxes and the customers who use them were a priority beyond just avoiding FCC fines, they'd have the right people and processes in place to keep us happy. I think we've gotten the message, now.

Where's that leave us? Well, our bill will be cut in half, at least after we pay for the new setup fee. We'll need to be more mindful and intentional toward what we watch on TV and how we get it, but somehow I think we'll manage. Past that, I think it'll feel good to pay less for a service provided by a company that doesn't really want our business and has a strange notion of customer service.

In the meantime, I think I'll be on the lookout for a better internet provider so we can ditch Bright House outright. The problem is, I don't think the market around here is exactly rife with competition.

Archived Comments

Craig Maloney
2011-06-11T15:57:19

Not sure if you can get it, but I've been happy with Wide Open West for my phone / Internet connectivity. Not sure how they handle the TV part of it, but they've been very responsive to me whenever there's been an outage.
- George H
  2011-06-11T16:46:11
  
  I'm using Wide Open West with a TiVo HD and a CableCard. Works great and no complaints. Although... looking through my Season Passes it looks like most of my shows are available on broadcast TV. That plus Netflix and a possible Hulu Plus subscription* would put my TV bill at around $25/mo. So now I'm thinking of cutting the cable for TV... * Aside: why are south park episodes on Hulu links to SouthParkStudios.com? Can you still get them on the Xbox?
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-11T17:27:31
  
  Yeah, no WOW here. Bright House really does have this area wrapped up. I think we *might* have access to AT&T's Uverse, but I'm not sure they're a much better option.
Steve Ivy
2011-06-11T19:09:08

Hi Les, We've been sans Cable-TV/sat for about 6 mos now, and we're getting by on Netflix and a few iTunes subscriptions and pertty happy about it. My wife really like some of the reality shows (Survivor, Amazing Race, So You Think You Can Dance) so we just invested in an antenna ande an EyeTV-one usb tuner. AS long as I'm not working on the computer thats doing the recording at the same time, the quality is great and we can watch the next day (still considering a hardware h.264 encoder). We use an AppleTV as our main box, the EyeTV exports to itunes so that shows just show up under "TV Shows" on the ATV. --Steve
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-14T15:21:40
  
  We get pretty much all of that with a TiVo, though I've been thinking about picking up an AppleTV and/or a Roku box to play with. I've been pretty surprised with the quality of HD over the air, provided that I get the antenna pointed *just right* :)
Slivertoung
2011-06-12T13:35:46

Birghthouse can only do so much, sometimes it takes a little to get the problem solved but trust me they are doing their best to give you the best in service possible at the most reasonable price. I have had Brighthouse for years and have a TiVo and yes at first it took a bit to get the kinks worked out but they came back till it was fixed on their own dime and now its great, other companys charge everytime they send someone out and most don't even bother working with you if you have Tivo becuase they don't support it. You can go with someone else but expect contracts, good deals that last a bit then trap you into higher prices till your contract is up and little to no customer service skills if you have to call in for help. Try it and when you hate it call BrightHouse back and they will be glad to come help you out and get you all fixed up again they will even help you out of you contract if they have to. Just some advice, if you have a problem don't let it just sit their and bother you, do something proactive let them know something is wrong and see if they don't hop to and try and fix it
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-12T17:12:01
  
  Here's the thing: We went through all of the above, a few years ago, just to get the TiVo working in the first place when we started service with Bright House. They apparently only have "the guy" who knows how to work with TiVo and CableCARDs, and we're "lucky" to get him. And, that was *before* the SDV transition started here. It's not my job to be proactive about their service. We're paying them, not the other way around. They knew something was wrong, because they knew enough to send us letters about breaking our service. They could have been proactive themselves and called us to schedule an appointment with "the guy" to get us hooked up with a tuning adapter before we started losing channels and reception quality. And, when we *did* finally call them, they sent the wrong guy to install the wrong stuff. Sure, we could let them come back and try again, but we've played this game before. We're not going with anyone else - we've cancelled cable altogether.
neilio
2011-06-14T15:24:01

Nice write up, and your experience basically mirrors ours, except replace "Brighthouse" with "Rogers|Bell" (our two major providers). We recently went 100% OTA, supplemented with Netflix and Hulu (via a geofence busting service). It's great, and seeing the pure, uncompressed OTA HD signal is a minor revelation.
- Metaksan
  2011-09-01T12:07:55
  
  Absolutely right..

Moved to Jekyll and Disqus

2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: My blog is now produced by Jekyll, with comments hosted by Disqus.

This blog has transitioned between a handful of publishing platforms - including Movable Type, blosxom, and Wordpress. Well, apparently, it's that time again. I've been toying with making a change again for a few years, and finally just got all the pieces together over the past week. This blog is now just a pile of static files produced by Jekyll, and the comments are now hosted by Disqus.

This has a lot of interesting implications:

I can neglect my server for long periods of time without worrying that my long-outdated copy of Wordpress has been exploited. Really, there's no reason for me to have a full-featured CMS running here.
I could host my entire blog on Amazon S3 or something similar, and be more neglectful by reducing active code even further. The only crappy thing is that I don't think I can send decafbad.com directly to S3, and would need to redirect to a CNAME on a subdomain on blog.decafbad.com.
I can edit my blog directly on GitHub and, assuming I get the webhooks set up, have my server rebuild the HTML automatically on a git push. I could probably use GitHub Pages and the Jekyll support there, but I suspect I'll be doing some Weird Things that they won't handle. (And probably for good reason.)
Since Disqus has all my comments now, I can stop worrying about running that code on my server too. I'm a little antsy about putting that in the cloud, but the escape routes are well lit and I should be able to replace it easily if I need to. Self-hosted, JS-include-based comments is a project in my TODO list.
My writing here is now all stored in individual text files, formatted with Markdown, annotated with YAML metadata, and subject to revision control under git. This combination feels like it has a lot of longevity and potential for survival even beyond this current experiment with Jekyll
Writing, editing, and publishing entries here can now more closely match my daily reality of living in MacVim and git. It sounds lame, but the notion of swapping over to a Wordpress admin page and working in a browser textarea has often kept me from even starting a post.

But, some things are broken, now:

Fixed ~~No more tag pages. I don't think very many humans visit these pages, but a lot of search engines do.~~
Fixed ~~No more tag feeds. I expect to hear about this soon, since this blog gets syndicated to Planet Mozilla via my "mozilla" tag feed.~~
No more year / month archive pages or sidebar widget. Not sure how many people actually stroll down memory lane here on my blog, but I do have a gigantor huge list of all my posts evar, now.
A general lack of contextual links to related posts and such. Turns out that running the LSI option on Jekyll is completely horrible.
Regeneration seems less-than-happy in general, and I wish it did conditional regneration. That is, only produce the HTML for things that need it because dependencies have changed. No need to rebake the whole world just because I changed one file.

The bright side is that there are solutions to all the broken things, and now I have something to tinker with again on my blog. So, let me know if anything else looks broken, and hopefully this will get me spewing some more words out onto this thing soon.

Archived Comments

Les Orchard
2011-06-08T17:45:54

Testing a comment here on my new post.
bkclements
2011-06-08T17:59:01

Hi, did you happen to look at blogofile for similar functionality? I'm still trying to decide which way to go. I prefer ReST markup..
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T18:08:26
  
  I've had my eye on Jekyll for awhile now and have a few friends also using it, so I haven't really checked out any other packages. Might be nice to poke around at something based in Python since my Ruby-fu is not strong, but then getting stronger in Ruby is not a bad thing for me. And, for myself, I'm pretty stubbornly rooted in Markdown for all my writing online
BillSeitz
2011-06-08T22:01:56

What kind of metadata are you storing in YAML?
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T22:30:10
  
  Pretty simple stuff: Title, tags, etc. You can see the source for this post here on github, for example: https://raw.github.com/lmorchard/blog.decafbad.com/master/_posts/2011-06-08-moved-to-jekyll.markdown I had once-upon-a-time thought about storing posts as RFC 822 messages, with the metadata in headers like email messages. But, this "YAML front matter" approach of Jekyll is a bit more flexible
Dave Dash
2011-06-08T23:02:15

Les, Check out what I did - I actually host my site on github thanks to TofuMatt's suggestion. It works well and I have archives and whatnot. In fact, most of my links didn't break. This also means that I don't have to regenerate and sync, since github knows jekyll: https://github.com/davedash/davedash.github.com
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T23:56:45
  
  Hmm... I might have to try that, but on a subdomain like blog.decafbad.com. I have some non-blog stuff here on decafbad.com and don't want to turn the whole thing over to github
  - Dave Dash
    2011-06-08T23:59:33
    
    It caused a few things to happen - speed up my deploy time and force me to check things into git. Also my codez build tags and stuff...
tiernano
2011-06-09T07:19:54

So, how did you move directly from Wordpress to Jekyll? was it simple enough to migrate, or is it a pain?
- Dave Dash
  2011-06-09T13:51:27
  
  There is a migration script for posts. I may have had to adjust some minor things. Risqué has a migration for comments. it wasn't too bad.
  - tiernano
    2011-06-09T14:14:31
    
    Already using Disqus for comments on my wordpress install... It's the blog data itself that's the problem... Will have a look and play with the migrators...
    - Les Orchard
      2011-06-09T14:24:16
      
      FWIW, the script I tweaked and used for exporting from my Wordpress database is here in github: https://github.com/lmorchard/blog.decafbad.com/blob/master/_import/wordpress-decafbad.rb The only real pain was getting the SQL query to pick up tags the way I wanted. Otherwise, it's just getting things into text files.
      - tiernano
        2011-06-09T15:07:03
        
        Cool beans man. Will try that out when I get a few min...
Lee Roberson
2011-06-09T16:45:18

Google Reader keeps getting tricked into thinking several of your posts are new, might be some kind of issue with your pubDate field in RSS, not sure.
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-09T16:48:38
  
  Yeah, that's my fault. :/ I had initially exported all my posts missing the actual time part of the pubDate, and then just a little while ago re-exported with the proper datestamps
  - Dave Dash
    2011-06-09T16:59:50
    
    You are worse than Delicious!
    - Les Orchard
      2011-06-09T17:05:52
      
      That's probably my fault, too.
Lee Roberson
2011-06-09T16:45:53

Whups.
Lloyd Hilaiel
2011-06-09T17:45:00

Have you had much success in customizing the features and display of the injected DISQUS UI? Thile there are several knobs in their UI, but the only form of customization that's worked for me is fiddling with external javscript and CSS... Specifically things like disabling media upload and changing default sort, and threading seem to be no-ops.
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-09T18:12:39
  
  Hmm... I haven't even bothered to try customizing yet. I just dropped it in and it vaguely matched the rest of my page style, so I left it alone so far
Craig Maloney
2011-06-11T16:00:04

Oh c'mon, there's nothing in the world more fun than updating Wordpress blog every time someone manages to sneeze wrong and cause an exploit. Sheesh, where's your sense of discipline.
jolyonwagg1
2011-06-21T23:52:22

Love to use disqus, and would like to integrate it onto my Wordpress blog for comments, as it is so user friendly, but I am not to hot though on all the HTML stuff, any advice would be greatly appreciated, cheers from across the pond.
Johan Sundström
2011-08-15T04:23:30

Your sidebar archive widget was rather cool, layout wise; I bookmarked it as design inspiration, back when it existed.
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-16T15:58:00
  
  Hmm, I should see if I can find a way to revive that thing as a JS widget or something
Timo Zimmermann
2011-09-01T12:48:10

how do you feel about using Disqus for your comments? Any problems or the urge to write your own JS based commenting system? I just feel a bit uncomfortable with a 3rd party provider for something important like comments...
- tiernano
  2011-09-01T12:54:22
  
  Personally speaking, i have been using Disqus comments on my WordPress blogs for a while now (couple of years) and its working grand! don't have to worry too much about Spam, they manage backups, etc. you can even reply to, or delete comments (if spam does get though) by email, so you can manage them on your phone.

Further Jekyll notes

2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: This is an in-progress entry, where I plan to collect some notes on how I've set up and am using Jekyll. I may call it "done" at some random point and publish it. I may even subsequently update it from time to time, after that.

To speed up the authoring / previewing cycle on my laptop, I move all but this years' posts into a _posts_archived folder and don't commit the change.
- Kind of a pain; feels like I'm Doing It Wrong.
Github Pages seems interesting, but I don't think it's right for me.
- My plugins don't run, so my tag pages aren't created.
  - davedash has a different approach for this, though.
- I can't get the permalinks just the way I like them
- I'd have to set a CNAME in my DNS to point at a subdomain (ie. blog.decafbad.com), because I don't want to delegate my entire root domain over to GitHub.
- I would 100% totally use GitHub Pages for another project that I'm starting from scratch, though.
Since related posts via LSI is such a bear, I may try doing something with tags. That is:
- take all the tags from a post;
- find the 5 latest posts for each tag;
- display the unique set of posts
I want my permalinks to look like /2011/06/08/slug
- Not /2011/06/08/slug/ or /2011/06/08/slug.html
- Look, ma, no trailing slash!
- This is the way I've had my URLs for years, and I want to maintain my URLspace.
- And I also don't want every URL missing a trailing slash to get bounced with a 301 Moved Permanently to the equivalent with a trailing slash. That's bogus.
- So, I'm using the pretty permalinks setting, and I have this in my nginx config:
  - if (-f $request_filename/index.html) { rewrite ^(.+)$ $1/index.html last; }

Archived Comments

fluffy
2011-06-09T04:55:35

I appreciate the notion behind the no-trailing-slash permalink (because really the only thing that should care about the specific format is the user-agent, and that's what content-type is for), but does that particular rule possibly wreak havoc on relative links? Or do you ever even use those anyway? I'm one of those few weirdos who actually does use relative links wherever possible, even on blog entries with a potentially weird URL (since I like uploading one-off images to the same directory as the published entry, and only having them visible "below the cut" as all the cool kids are calling "extended entry" these days).
Michel Krämer
2011-08-17T19:19:29

Thanks for your tips. Did you have success with your custom approach for generating related posts? It would be quite cool, if you could share your plugin. Thanks, Michel
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-17T19:44:18
  
  Alas, I haven't gotten around to the related posts stuff, yet

Pay phones and Firefox features

2011-02-07T04:32:31+00:00

TL;DR: Pay phones have been disappearing, and so might some Firefox features. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing: Some features steal attention from others that are more important. Some could be spun off into add-ons, which are getting easier to make.

Update: Feel free to comment on this blog post. But, if you feel strongly about these features, you might get a better discussion with more people on this thread from the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup (in Google Groups).

Phone Don't Work No More by Thomas Hawk

When's the last time you used a pay phone? For me, it's been over a decade—which is about how long I've had a cell phone.

As it turns out, pay phones have been disappearing for awhile now. Why? Because pay phones are expensive to keep in working order. If more and more people have wireless phones, it's less likely that any particular pay phone will result in value for the phone company.

So what?

The reason I'm thinking about this is that I'm troubled by a few bugs I ran into in Bugzilla:

Are these like pay phones?

Each one requires engineering effort to keep working from release to release in Firefox. Some of them have issues in performance and functionality that could use some attention. And, the introduction of Firefox Sync, for example, introduces some new complexities in tracking changes.

But, do any of these features provide enough value to justify continued attention?

Microsummaries

Ever heard of microsummaries? I have, and I thought they'd be neat. I installed a plugin on my blog to offer a microsummary, and I tried hacking them into Delicious at one point during a Hack Day.

That was about 4 years ago, and I haven't thought about them much since. Sounds like a pay phone to me.

Smart Bookmarks

I always wondered how those out-of-box "Recently Bookmarked", "Recent Tags", and "Most Visited" folders worked in Firefox. Turns out that you can bookmark queries against the internal Places database as a persistent search folder. Seems pretty keen.

But, I've been using Firefox for years and only just learned about this in the past month. The feature's not very exposed, and it's not obvious how to use it. In fact, the bug to remove it might list the clearest hints on using it.

Seems like it might be a good feature to jettison into an add-on, like a pay phone to play with in your basement.

Tagging Bookmarks

This is a no-brainer for me: I like tagging my bookmarks. The problem is that I've exceeded 16,000 bookmarks. It's been years since any browser coped well with my corpus of bookmarks—that's one of the reasons I started really liking Delicious.

However, tagging bookmarks in Firefox is kind of rough. The UI isn't awesome, and the database supporting it could use some work. Rather than improve things, though, bug 622047 proposes removing the functionality altogether.

Here, I'm conflicted: I don't use tags in Firefox, because I don't use bookmarks in Firefox. If they worked better, I might use them. Instead, I use pinboard.in or a private Delicious clone of my own that copes with my scale—in fact, I got to this scale because those services handle it. So, usage data from me would support the feature's removal despite what I think I'd like to see.

But, does my suspicion that I would use a feature justify someone else's time in making it better? I don't think I can ask for that with a straight face.

Put another way, I could see how that pay phone they removed from the corner gas station could someday come in handy, but should I expect the phone company to keep it clear of graffiti until I come along with quarters?

Livemarks

Live Bookmarks (or Livemarks) are bookmark folders whose contents are generated from RSS and Atom feeds periodically polled by Firefox. They're feed subscriptions, built into the browser.

So, when I saw bug 622049, my first thought was "Hey! I'm using those!"

I just spent a week building an add-on powered by Livemarks. I've been using Fireriver on a daily basis, and I've been thinking about trying more experiments. But, if livemarks are going away, then I'm working toward a dead end.

Like tagging bookmarks, the UI and feed polling code behind livemarks could use some work. My add-on was an attempt to improve the interface, but I did report a bug on performance issues raised by my import of around 700 subscriptions from Google Reader. That's just one more strike against livemarks for bug 622049.

In the end, if livemarks go away I'd still have Google Reader. I'll have blown a week or so on this add-on, though I did learn some interesting things. And, if Google Reader goes away, it's not like I've never written a feed reader before.

Still, this one bothers me the most, in terms of what I want to see for the web itself. This is better explored in another blog post, but I want my browser to do more of the surfing for me. I think of bookmarks as long-term relationships to web resources—and livemarks turn those static links into live updates. I can think of a lot of uses for this functionality built into the browser, rather than delegated to lobster traps and content silos.

But, livemarks do complicate things for Firefox engineers. They don't interact well with Sync, and the feed polling code has cases where it can really drag down the whole browser. And, of course, livemarks aren't good for much when a laptop's closed or if Firefox isn't running. Granted, the former happens more often than the latter for me, but we're not talking about an always-on server here in any case.

Are livemarks a pay phone feature? Personally, I don't think so. I think Firefox is diminished if it loses this feature, rather than taking it further.

Although I'm reticent to do so, I might just rebuild livemarks in some form with an add-on if they go away. The good news is that add-ons are getting easier to write, which also deserves its own blog post. The bad news is, I might not have time or motivation to do the work myself. But, either, I'm not all that comfortable clamoring for other people's time for this beyond registering my disagreement and backing off.

Conclusion

Most of these things do indeed look like pay phones to me. Most of them seem not to offer enough value to pay for upkeep.

Livemarks are the exception, in my mind, but I don't have answers as to how to fix their flaws. Maybe they're inherently doomed in the face of ubiquitous computing, maybe they're just in need of a better execution. But, I won't expect other busy engineers to drop what they're doing to come up with those answers in the meantime.

Archived Comments

Bo
2011-02-07T05:38:07

I don't care about microsummaries or smart bookmarks, but Firefox without tags would totally break how I interact with my several hundred bookmarks.
Manoj Mehta
2011-02-07T06:20:40

Agree with you 100% of the way.
Anon
2011-02-07T06:24:22

Interesting read, but it hurts, after spending a lot of time searching for barely-existent documentation, to configure a great system with smart bookmarks keeping track of my tags and bookmark organizations. I'd really miss the feature and I don't think a bookmark can provide the same level of functionality. On the other hand, I loathe live bookmarks and I use google reader and minor desktop applets to fetch site updates.

Notice that what I consider useful and productive you consider a pay phone. Firefox's strength over its competition is the customization power (because no matter how you put it, Chrome's extensions are laughable in comparison). I think that, out of the 4 features, only the first is actually useless to most users.

Smart bookmarks were neglected after getting out of the 3.0 heat, while pursuit for other things such as Ubiquity, Jetpacks and Panorama took place. I hope Panorama doesn't get abandoned this fast, as I really see myself using it (although can't upgrade until imglikeopera does).
- l.m.orchard
  2011-02-07T07:37:13
  
  Would Smart Bookmarks still be useful to you, if they were enabled with an add-on? I suspect it could be done, which might be win-win for core Firefox devs vs people interested in carrying the feature foward in an add-on
  
  I never knew what Smart Bookmarks were until this month, and I've been using Firefox since the beginning. So, yeah, they look pay-phone-y to me.
  
  Nonetheless, it might be interesting to see what kind of system you have working with them. They seem like they could be pretty powerful
  - blufive
    2011-02-07T08:35:39
    
    (pardon me for butting in)
    
    yes, an add-on would work for me.
    
    My system is pretty much that suggested by David Regev below: use the smart bookmarks to create a "folder" system based on tags. This is way easier to maintain/update than manually sorted folders, and allows bookmarks to exist in multiple locations.
  - Anon
    2011-02-07T12:07:12
    
    If the full capabilities of both tagging and places queries are available, then yes, as long as it's not one of those "can't update firefox until it updates 2 months later" extensions...But from the sounds of it the whole backend is going to be removed or simplified. Will it be possible for an addon to get there?
David Regev
2011-02-07T07:09:59

I’ll add some input from my own experience with bookmark tagging. I have bookmarks going back over a decade. Until about a year ago, they were a huge mess and nearly impossible to deal with. The big problem was that the folders were too restrictive and, so, the placement of many bookmarks was pretty arbitrary. So, I finally decided to go through every bookmark, delete all the useless stuff (the vast majority of bookmarks), and attach one or more tag to each bookmark. It took about a week. The result: the organization system now makes sense, and I have few enough bookmarks that I actually use them quite a lot. The problem is that the interface is designed for folders and not tags. I cannot drill down tags like I can with folders. Tags don’t appear in the bookmarks menu like folders. I had to create smart bookmarks to work around this limitation. Even with these artificial limitations in the interface, tags are much more humane than folders.

My suggestion: deprecate folders altogether. In a future version of Firefox, migrate everyone to tags by converting them to tags. Moreover, fix the interface so as to make sense for tags instead of folders. Do that, and you’ll find that people start using tags. I agree that it’s kind of overkill to have both folders and tags. But the solution is to get rid of the archaic system of forced hierarchy (folders) and give tags the chance they deserve (by greatly improving the tagging interface).
- l.m.orchard
  2011-02-07T07:40:18
  
  FWIW, if I used bookmarks in Firefox, this is exactly what I'd do. I really prefer using tags over folders, for escaping restrictions of hierarchy and for organizing on the fly
  - Asa Dotzler
    2011-02-07T09:01:44
    
    Folders currently have the advantage of "open all in tabs" which is kind of nice for batches of sites you commonly access at the same time. I'm not saying that the same feature couldn't be implemented for groups of tags, but currently folders have it and tags don't.
    - David Regev
      2011-02-07T18:55:10
      
      Asa: That’s actually already possible for tags (such as when exposed as smart bookmarks). The command doesn’t appear in the submenu, like it does for folders, but it’s there in the context menu. You can also middle-click on them instead.
- Matěj Cepl
  2011-02-07T09:22:12
  
  You don't need to look through tags ... just throwing bunch of them in the AwesomeBar will put the appropriate links to the top of the list. From all mentioned payphones tags would really hurt me, and I am on the fence with LiveBookmarks ... I don't use them (rss2email works better for me for reading feeds), but I distrust The Cloud and I don't like the trend to save all our personal data with an advertising agency for their free use. Certainly better UI would help.
Felix Pleșoianu
2011-02-07T07:39:30

"I’ve been using Firefox for years and only just learned about this in the past month. The feature’s not very exposed, and it’s not obvious how to use it."

That's the problem right there. It's like putting a payphone into a basement, inside a broom closet with a sign on the door labelled "beware the leopard" and then complaining nobody uses it.

"And, of course, livemarks aren’t good for much when a laptop’s closed or if Firefox isn’t running."

Neither is a dedicated RSS client by that logic. I agree that live bookmarks are largely useless (too fussy about the feed format is what bothers me most about them), but you're using the wrong argument.

More generally, I agree that these features are rather obscure and may not be missed by most people, but do they complicate and slow down Firefox more than, say, XUL? Seriously, Opera manages to have a proper RSS reader, mail client and lots of other features built in while being much smaller and lighter than Firefox. And it's a proprietary browser. Aren't you picking on small issues while ignoring the large ones?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-02-07T07:59:28
  
  "It’s like putting a payphone into a basement, inside a broom closet with a sign on the door labelled “beware the leopard” and then complaining nobody uses it."
  
  That's true, and part of what bothers me. Seems like some features can get axed with usage data as the rationale, but they could be made better.
  
  But, whether any particular feature got a fair shake or not, dev priorities change.
  
  "Neither is a dedicated RSS client by that logic."
  
  Actually, the argument I left out is ubiquitous computing. That is desktop to laptop to mobile to TV to car.
  
  I stopped using a dedicated RSS client around 4 years ago when my phone got capable of skimming feeds and I couldn't get to NetNewsWire on my Mac from it.
  
  "More generally, I agree that these features are rather obscure and may not be missed by most people, but do they complicate and slow down Firefox more than, say, XUL?"
  
  I can't really speak to that... I'm more webdev than core Firefox dev. You can read the bugs, though, to see the arguments made. Though, from what I hear, XUL isn't really such a big problem, especially not since the JS code behind the scenes enjoys the same performance boosts as JS in page content.
Mardeg
2011-02-07T08:06:49

It seems most of these revolve around the hassle they've become for Firefox Sync to support. Here's a thought: Sync was an extension to begin with, let's move it back there after Firefox 4 is released and it fails to cope with the massive influx of people using it, instead of killing the other features in an attempt to prevent Sync dying.
FP
2011-02-07T09:00:15

Do the developers not realise that driving away power users doesn't just lose you a few users it loses you a whole network of users since many power users maintain their friends and families PCs too? It also loses you popular support from tech blogs and sites etc.

Anyway, I hope they don't remove tagging and livemarks that would be painful, like Mardeg, I'd much rather lose sync than these features.
Nathaniel Tucker
2011-02-07T10:02:06

Please don't remove bookmark tagging! I like being able to find webpages using the awesomebar, and I couldn't do that without control over labeling. I don't see what's so horrible about the UI - you just enter what you want.
Michael Lefevre
2011-02-07T10:50:16

I can't say I make a lot of use of any of those features. I do use tags, but I could do the same thing with bookmark folders.

The trouble is that Firefox is still introducing features which aren't very polished or discoverable. If Firefox 6 is going to drop support for, say, sync or panorama, then it has been a bit of a waste of core development time implementing those features, hasn't it? Is there a way of getting development to focus on improving the existing stuff, rather than focusing on new features?
Andy
2011-02-07T11:38:11

Mardeg has a point. Throughout FF4's development it's felt like any new team or project can make drastic changes to the browser with seemingly flimsy justification (see the UI team's constant fiddling with a stable interface to save miniscule amounts of vertical space and emulate Chrome's aesthetic). Sync is a nice feature but it needs time to bake just like everything else; we shouldn't rip out other features that have existed for years to prop up something unproven.

In some ways I think the Test Pilot program has been dangerous; the statistics gathered tend to result in design decisions that favour the tyranny of the majority while breaking long-term usage patterns employed by smaller groups ("power users" as they're affectionately called, also known as Firefox's Chief Proponents). This popularist-majority mindset can be seen in the design decisions regarding the status bar, tab positioning, the hiding of the bookmark bar on first launch after upgrade and the new awful addons manager.

It's also lame to see it argued on the bugtracker that tags should be stored in the cloud but that we shouldn't use the new feature that does exactly that to put them there. Who knows which direction Sync will go a year after release? Maybe we'll gain the ability to set bookmarks public and browse them on a website like Delicious... surely we'll need the tag info then.

One last thing: this may be a little snarky, but if a major argument for removing tagging support is an underexposed and unpolished UI then Sync is doomed. A menu entry that shows a dialog with no description of the feature isn't the best way to sell it. I still don't have a clue whether it's working or not.
Andy
2011-02-07T12:16:15

Mardeg has a point. Throughout FF4's development it's felt like any new team or project can make drastic changes to the browser with seemingly flimsy justification (see the UI team's constant fiddling with a stable interface to save miniscule amounts of vertical space and emulate Chrome's aesthetic). Sync is a nice feature but it needs time to bake just like everything else; we shouldn't rip out other features that have existed for years to prop up something unproven.

In some ways I think the Test Pilot program has been dangerous; the statistics gathered tend to result in design decisions that favour the tyranny of the majority while breaking long-term usage patterns employed by smaller groups ("power users" as they're affectionately called, also known as Firefox's Chief Proponents). This popularist-majority mindset can be seen in the design decisions regarding the status bar, tab positioning, the hiding of the bookmark bar on first launch after upgrade and the new awful addons manager.

It's also lame to see it argued on the bugtracker that tags should be stored in the cloud but that we shouldn't use the new feature that does exactly that to put them there. Who knows which direction Sync will go in a year after release? Maybe we'll gain the ability to set bookmarks public and browse them on a website like Delicious... surely we'll need the tag info then.

One last thing: this may be a little snarky, but if a major argument for removing tagging support is an underexposed and unpolished UI then Sync is doomed. A menu entry that shows a dialog with no description of the feature isn't the best way to sell it. I still don't have a clue whether it's working or not.
Benedikt P.
2011-02-07T12:55:49

My bookmarks are organized in a rather flat manner with little to no sub-folders.Being able to tag a bookmark and search and save the searchs (Smartbookmarks?) are much more useful to me. (I have hundreds of bookmarks not thousands, though)

Microsummaries sound useful in theory but I think I never found one in the wild.

Livebookmarks are unnecessary for me. Firefox is just not a real feed reader.
Danny Moules
2011-02-07T13:01:25

Are Livemarks really a niche thing? I started using them after seeing a large number of users using them and wondering what I was missing. Now my entire bookmarks toolbar is full of them.

We don't even have metrics to back this up, do we? I would have never anticipated that this would be a feature worth dropping.

Anyway, I've replied to the bug. I wonder what we'll get from test pilot if it goes that way..
Adil Allawi
2011-02-07T13:59:29

"The payphone in the basement" is a good idea for (to use a horrible phrase from Yahoo) sunsetting little-used browser features into add-ons. But the problems happen when new browser versions come out that are incompatible with these add-ons and no one is around to update them. I will have this issue moving to Thunderbird 3.3 and a number of add-ons that i depend on will no longer work.

My suggestion is to make sure such features are reimplemented in new browser APIs like JetPack (and update JetPack to support the hooks needed by these features). Then make sure the JetPack API is stable enough not to break in future browsers.
Gruber
2011-02-07T14:14:35

Tags are the best feature introduced that was introduced with Fx 3.0! I don't need the other stuff, I don't need folders but tags (together with the Awesome-Bar) are one of the two reasons I love Firefox (the other is the extensibility through add-ons, and I am thinking about a particular that ATM can't be ported to other browsers).

BTW, I always thought pay phones were heavily subsidised.
alanjstr
2011-02-07T14:21:22

Of those features, I see more potential for Smart Bookmarks/Tagging than I do for the other two.

If a website has a microsummary, I have no idea. I don't know where it would show up in my web browser. I had to Google to find The MozillaWiki describing them as "Microsummaries are better for labeling bookmarks than static page titles, because they give users quicker access to the most interesting information behind a bookmark, and they give web sites a way to notify users of updates and entice them to revisit the site." If you have your bookmarks open constantly, and are monitoring something, then sure that would be helpful. But usually if we want real-time monitoring of something, there are other methods that we use. We have moved to increasing screen real-estate, making tabs into just icons and hiding the bookmark toolbar.

I never got the hang of LiveMarks in the browser. That definitely has a lot to do with UI. But trying to turn a web browser into a full-fledged feed-reader, as part of the core technology, isn't the right direction. There are addons, websites, and stand-alone readers that do a much better job. The more RSS feeds you subscribe to, it quickly overwhelms the basics. Personally, I do like having the little orange button in my URL bar to subscribe (I have it auto-routing to Google Reader), but that's mostly because it provides a fast way to subscribe instead of me hunting for a link.

Lastly, Smart Bookmarks and Tags have a lot of potential, especially as the volume of bookmarks grows. I don't use either of them, but I wouldn't want to see them gone.
Gruber
2011-02-07T14:35:08

One more thing, I wonder if these arguments against these "pay phones" could/will also be made for Panorama and Tab Groups, I personally wouldn't shed a tear for it.
augustm
2011-02-07T19:16:39

Firstly SQL has been broken in Firefox 3.6.x and 4.0b since the summer. It makes searching on tags in bookmarks almost impossible. So tags are mostly broken. Any data on hot areas is unusable- the interface does not work.

Sync has deleted, duplicated, re-ordered my bookmarks multiple times. Disaster! Worse than anything else, multiple data-loss bugs, requires restore from backup (Mac's have time machine)

There is not document that says what Sync does. How does it manage the use of multiple machines? I am on a campus where I read, mark and delete in five departments. How do I manage asynchronous marking and deleting? I often turn on/off machines quickly. What is my mental model of the final state?

I should have stayed with rync!

Bookmarks needs a project leader
James Napolitano
2011-02-08T08:49:27

About the idea of moving features into addons: dbaron had a nice post a while back about the drawbacks of this approach: http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060122a The situation with addons.mozilla.org may have changed since then, but I think a lot of what he says still holds.
Mook
2011-02-08T08:54:22

Seems like for all of these features, the problem is that the UI wasn't really that good. It's somewhat difficult to create microsummaries or smart bookmarks (as a user, without the web site supporting it). Tags are easy to create, but are presented everywhere as a single list, which makes large numbers of them infeasible (rather than something closer to a tag cloud). Livemarks... well, they basically have no useful way of showing the summary, just... half a headline :p Only if it actually opened the feed preview page rather than a useless dropdown...

As I understand it, it's mostly things getting cut to make the release, then... well, just getting dropped on the floor once the release is out, really. There's never a focus on polishing things. But that's pretty much true of all the projects I've looked close enough at, sadly.

I wonder which ones would be next? Devtools, with the backend sticking around for Firebug? More changes to the URL display on hovering links? Firefox menu-button?
csb
2011-02-08T20:09:45

Bookmark tagging is one of the best features of Firefox. If anything the problem is that as currently implemented it has not enabled more great addons like tagsieve [1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tagsieve/
Stuart Woodward
2011-05-18T14:45:46

Several years ago, my wife laughed when I accidentally bought a prepaid payphone card instead of train card. It sat in my wallet for years until the day my cellphone battery died and all I had was my WIFI iPad. I looked up her phone number in my contacts and called her from the nearest payphone though it was a struggle to find the payphone in one of the most modern building complexes here in Tokyo.

Another payphone story that came to mind was shortly after the recent Earthquake. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people walked home. Some walking several hours. In my short walk to camp out a nearby friend's house, I saw people queuing up for payphones after their mobile phones had become unusable due to the mobile network congestion. The line to use the payphone was hundreds of people long. I'm sure that the maximum queue length at that phone in the previous 10 years was 2 people. This experience changed my mind.

There are much fewer payphones than their heyday 15 years ago when we had payphones with ISDN jacks to plug in your laptop. It is difficult to find one now. Also, payphones are clunky and in Tokyo at least, very reliable. They are going to work, if nothing else works.

Introducing Fireriver, a River of News for Firefox 4

2011-01-27T06:36:52+00:00

TL;DR: I have a history of building news aggregators. Now, I've built one as an addon for Firefox 4.

This is Fireriver, an experimental add-on for Firefox 4. You can find the source code on GitHub.

Fireriver uses Live Bookmarks to build a River of News in your browser. No unread counts, no 3-pane view like an email client. Just paddle down the page with the space bar or your scroll wheel.

Organize the Live Bookmarks into folders to split things up into multiple rivers—which is not a strict River of News, per se. But, I like using them to focus on particular topics or priorities I happen to have time for.

It also displays a more obvious notification when a site has a feed and lets you add a new Live Bookmark subscription to the Fireriver folder with one click. (I'm considering splitting this feature off into its own small add-on.)

Of course, when I say experimental, I mean that this is my first Firefox add-on ever. I'm starting to use it daily, but I'm well-versed in nuking and rebuilding my Firefox profile. I haven't had to do that yet, but I'm expecting to have to do it eventually. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it turns out I haven't totally screwed something up.

Other add-ons you may enjoy

If you like the idea of this add-on, you may also enjoy these:

OPML Support - I just used this to dump in 800 subscriptions from Google Reader
Reliby - This lets you reload all Live Bookmarks on demand
Feedly - A more "magazine" style news aggregator in the browser
Feed Sidebar - Live Bookmarks in a sidebar
LiveClick - Still under development for Firefox 4, but I liked this in 3.6

Archived Comments

fluffy
2011-01-27T18:40:35

That looks like a pretty nice interface to Live Bookmarks, but it still has the inherent problem of not being nice and cloudy. Is there any provision for Live Bookmark synchronization?

Of course, the other problem for me is that I prefer Chrome these days, and of course Chrome solves the sync issue by having nothing to sync to begin with.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:58:53
  
  Yeah, lack of clouds is the drawback here.
  
  There is a bit of a sync story, though. If you're using Firefox Sync, the Live Bookmark subscriptions will carry across machines along with the rest of your bookmarks. Also, I'm using history to hide items from display, and that is covered by sync too.
  
  I need to check, but I don't think items within the Live Bookmarks are sync'd, so each machine is on its own for doing the actual feed polling.
  
  I'm also thinking a bit about Brent Simmons' notions about thin-server RSS sync, and if it has a place in this thing. Google Reader sync might also be nice.
  
  And once I get my head wrapped around add-ons for Firefox on android, I might do a mobile version of this thing so that side of things is covered.

What should be done about feeds in browsers?

2011-01-27T06:11:00+00:00

TL;DR: Browsers need help doing a better job using feeds for discovery, aggregation, and publishing on the web to keep us from swimming into self-destructing lobster traps.

Last week, I wrote some blog posts about Bug 578967, wherein the feed auto-discovery icon in Firefox 4 has been moved off the URL bar and hidden by default. I support that decision of the UX team, because that feed button is a slacker. And even if it does get used, I'm not a fan of what it does anyway.

But, I've got lots more rattling around in my head about this stuff.

What's the point of feeds?

Feeds—that's RSS and Atom and maybe even JSON—let robots pull lots of stuff from a bunch of places and pile it all together in one spot for your perusal, analysis, and remixing pleasure. Feed readers and news aggregators do the surfing for you, so you don't have to.

But, Twitter and Facebook and others have managed to make the people themselves all gather in one spot. So, to see what those people are saying and doing, you just have to go there—kind of like what feeds promised, right? Only, you go there rather than all that stuff coming here.

The problem is, even if the logo says it loves you, the people who made it say that won't always stay in charge. And, someday, when whomever's left rides off into the sunset, you'll learn how much they didn't care about you in the end.

For some people and some places, that's no big tragedy. It's just a party; you go home when it's over. You made memories, you hope to find some of those people again elsewhere. Pownce croaked, and so did Vox, but who cares? There's always Twitter next door for the afterparty.

But, what if a world you lived in evaporated while you were on vacation elsewhere for the holidays? I guess you could say that was just a game and, again, who cares?

What if Flickr went away just like that? People are not only partying there—they're leaving their visual memories at the coat check. Things are a little more real there, by some definitions thereof.

What if you never swam into that lobster trap, though? What if your words and images and creations were borrowed and copied, but never wholly kept in someone else's bucket? What if Flickr were just like Google Search? That is, a collector and an index—but never the host—of photos and conversations?

Feeds can help make that happen, but not by themselves.

Do feeds belong in the browser?

Well, yeah. Would sites like Twitter and Facebook have been as successful if feeds worked better in the browser? I think so. But, by working better, I don't just mean improvements to that funky blue thing that showed up in the location bar every now and then. No, I mean all of the following:

Discovery — help me find and follow interesting people and things
Aggregation — give me one spot where what I find and follow is delivered to me
Publishing — enable me to post things where people (and their agents) can find and follow

To me, this is where Twitter and Facebook are totally nailing it. But, much of this can happen in the browser, and I think more of it should. Projects like RockMelt and Flock have seemed promising to me in this context, but have yet to really thrill me. I don't think they go far enough.

There is a point where the rubber (client) meets the road (server)—but that point can live so much farther down the stack than it does now. Mind you, I don't want a revival of Netscape Gold as such—but recall that "the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader".

We need some services and hosts out there as rendezvous points for our browsers and agents, but we really don't need any of those services to collapse into the next all-encompassing AOL-style singularity. There's money to be made there, but most of us are the product.

Whose job is it anyway?

I'd like to see my employer, Mozilla, do more with feeds in the browser—and I suspect we will. Mozilla Labs has had some interesting Concept Series topics, and I look forward to seeing some of those things get pursued further. If I can carve out the time, I wouldn't mind helping.

Something I find interesting about feed auto-discovery—the thing that started this latest round of buzz—is that it didn't originate with browser makers. RSS auto-discovery was itself discovered by bloggers, way back in 2002. It wasn't until we sussed out the details of that HTML link tag and shoved it into our pages that browsers like Firefox started looking for it.

Hell, even though RSS started with Netscape, it took Dave Winer and UserLand and friends running with it to keep it alive and kicking. Now, Dave's suggested forking an open source browser to show Mozilla how it's done. I support the sentiment, but there are easier ways to go about this.

Making it your job

Christopher Blizzard:

We created add-ons with the original Firefox as a way to be able to say “no” in a constructive manner. If you want something that you think is important to you, you can make an add-on.

That could be taken as a cop-out, but it's not. With the efforts behind Jetpack—now just the Add-on SDK—building add-ons for Firefox is being made easier. Rather than dealing with a morass of XUL and obscure APIs that I know has scared me personally away all these years, you can now do most everything you'd like though much-simplified JavaScript APIs and HTML/CSS.

In other words, if you are a web developer—albeit a fairly advanced one—you can make an add-on for Firefox. Hopefully, as the Add-on SDK advances, the bar to participation will continue to drop.

To be continued

I'm running out of steam and it's time for bed, so I think I'll just trail off for now. I do have a bit more in me, though. The next thing is about taking my own advice in that last section and making some of this my job to fix.

Archived Comments

Majken "Lucy" Connor
2011-01-27T06:38:04

Yay!

Feeds are soo soo soooo great, but not as live bookmarks. Google Reader is the place to be in terms of functionality, but there's no reason I have to put everything through google.

When I find a site I like, why should I have to go to it to check for new content? A feed reader brings it to me AND it remembers where I was. I've been trying to get my kids hooked on it, though they seem to forget about it.

Speaking of the kids, their teachers are getting all technical and they post the homework online, but I've been pulling my hair out for 2 years trying to get them to do it in a way that enables feeds. Several nights it happened that they didn't write down what they had and then we had to remember to check periodically because the homework wasn't updated right away.

Right now they're sent home with books with it all written down and I'm supposed to sign that I saw it, but who remembers to look at a book all the time? It's such a complicated process - kids have to write it down in the first place, then one of us has to remember to show it to me. FEEDS!!! No one has to remember, it just shows up where I'm already looking!

So glad you're on board.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:54:22
  
  Not sure if the homework lists online are behind a login or not, but if it's in HTML we can hack a feed out of it :)
Bee
2011-01-27T08:13:46

"Discovery — help me find and follow interesting people and things Aggregation — give me one spot where what I find and follow is delivered to me Publishing — enable me to post things where people (and their agents) can find and follow" .. Erm google reader?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T15:02:20
  
  Yup. I use Google Reader every day. Google owns it, though. It's not Facebook or Twitter, but it's not mine.
  - fluffy
    2011-01-27T17:01:25
    
    Whenever I'm going through my occasional "Google scares me" phases I go back to FeedOnFeeds. It has a few rough edges, but it has the nice advantage that it's software you install on your own server somewhere, and it works pretty much just like Google Reader in terms of aggregation. It also has some rudimentary publishing stuff, although IIRC it's in the form of a public RSS feed that other people subscribe to. Which actually isn't a bad model, really.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-27T17:34:03
      
      I think I've used FeedOnFeeds before, though it looks like it's not moved in awhile. There's also Tiny Tiny RSS, which looks a little more kept-up.
CiaranG
2011-01-27T10:45:08

Do feeds belong in the browser? Well, to the extent that while looking at a web page, there may be related feeds that the browser can auto-discover. Do I want to read them in the browser? No.

All I ever wanted was for the feed button in Mozilla product A, Firefox, to be able to add a subscription to that feed in Mozilla product B, Thunderbird. You'd think that would be a simple and obvious thing that would just work, but even by hooking the two together with a selection of Heath Robinson-style scripts, it's still never been possible to get them to play nicely.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T15:06:57
  
  That's a good point - a lot of this falls under the bailiwick of Mozilla Messaging, who work on Thunderbird. Personally, I never liked feeds in an email client, though.
  
  But, that reminds me they've got this thing called Raindrop that I haven't looked at in awhile. It might be interesting.
Robert Kaiser
2011-01-27T14:42:53

Fun that you say that XUL scared you away from doing add-ons, as doing everything that I think should be markup in JS scares me away from doing restartless add-ons or using the new SDK. I guess there's different people thinking differently. ;-)

For the actual topic, I think you're dead-on. I have subscribed to feeds from twitter, statusnet and identica, but as there's no interface to write messages from there, I just don't post anything there (and I intentionally don't have accounts on monolithic services like Facebook or twitter).

We need to get a better integration for pulling together info and communication in the browser. My "RMD" concept - http://wiki.kairo.at/wiki/RMD - could be one possible basis, but it might be overdoing it, given that I very much come from traditional messaging...
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-28T18:32:07
  
  Yeah, XUL has been one of those things on my to-research list for years and years, but I've never really dove in. Then, Jetpack comes along, and at least the entry point is similar to what I've been doing for the last decade or so.
  
  But even that is sneaky, because I have access now to those "obscure Mozilla APIs" and I'm finding myself learning them now anyway since Jetpack got me in the door. :)
  
  Your RMD concept is interesting, though. Might be more to the point than the piggy-backing I'm doing on Live Bookmarks. I've also been wondering how things like pubsubhubub might feed into things like this
@sull
2011-01-27T19:50:36

Question. Whats your opinion on FF (and other browsers) handling of the direct feed url? I've long wanted browsers to back off from forcing their own baked-in handling (stylesheets, functionality etc). I've just wanted the simple alert dialog (now standardized for all alerts like geolocation, passwords etc) to appear when necessary before the browser takes over (Like you include with Fireriver auto-discovery).

The obvious example is when a feed specifies its own XSL stylesheet but FF ignores this instruction and the sniffer only cares about the presence of the <rss or <feed element before treating this 'document' differently than any other XML document. This can be overcome with some hacks but that is a moot point.

Ideally, the browser will adhere to the content publisher's (or feed generator's) instructions on how to handle the presentation of the data. That plus XSLT is a W3C standard.

Definitely interested in your thoughts on this angle of the "feeds in browser" discussion.

Thanks,

Sull
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-27T20:52:52
  
  I'm not a fan of the built-in stylesheet for feeds. That change actually cost me a bunch of hours at work back then, trying to figure out why my XSL stopped working.
  
  IMO, that broke something I was using, but didn't go far enough to make it worth breaking. And, it's not really gone much farther since then.
  - @sull
    2011-01-28T03:23:25
    
    thanks for pointing out your post from yesteryear. the issue needs some new noise. FF4 is unchanged.
skierpage
2011-01-28T11:09:07

"We need some services and hosts out there as rendezvous points for our browsers and agents,"

Why? I can e-mail directly to another user at a computer; BitTorrent transfers file chunks directly to other computers. So why can't my computer transfer my pictures, status updates, favorite links, snarky comments, etc. DIRECTLY to the computers of lists of people (misnamed as "friends" by Facebook)?

The correct response to the dangers of centralization is running your own server. That needs to become the norm rather than some scary IT project that only geeks ever attempt! Your "server" could just be Firefox accepting connections from lists of people.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-28T18:04:52
  
  No, generally, you can't e-mail directly to another user at a computer. You send a message to a server, which then sends it to their server, and eventually their mail client picks it up. There are intermediaries.
  
  BitTorrent relies on trackers (ie. rendezvous points) before you can start transferring chunks, though the distributed hash stuff helps get away from that. But, if all that were easy (including discovery), it would have taken off long, long ago.
  
  You can't go P2P for everything, at least not easily. Not every P is online at all times, so we need store-and-forward services. Some P's have multiple devices and agents, and most of those are behind firewalls and NAT. So, we need servers out there as accessible fixed points that are (mostly) always available. We can try to build P2P meshes that do the same thing, but servers are simpler.
  
  And, yeah, I do believe that running your own server is the ultimate solution. Or, at least, finding someone to run it for you who cares about keeping it up, whether through direct payment or other direct incentive (ie. they're family or friends). Otherwise, you still have the problem where what they care about doesn't match what you care about (eg. ad supported services).
  But, with the way the user agent picture is splitting up across devices (eg. the cloud, ambient computing), I don't think Firefox will ever be the server. Even if you connect user agents together with something like Jabber/XMPP, you still need a server out there—though at least that's pushing things in the right direction, since an XMPP server can be agnostic about the messages that go through it
  
  I do have another blog post rattling around in my head about hosting. It's too hard right now; charging money smothers a lot of use; etc.
  - @sull
    2011-01-28T21:17:32
    
    Opera Unite is out there but it too leverages a centralized service as a proxy. But it is a great experiment and give them credit for moving it forward and into their browser product. The problem that will creep up is of course bandwidth limitations, especially on the UP. And this is only going to get worse as providers tighten up the pipes.

How to use feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4

2011-01-15T17:20:22+00:00

TL;DR: The feed button is not dead; it's just been sent to sing backup in Firefox 4 because it's not pulling its weight up front. This post discusses how you can still use feed auto-discovery, even restoring the icon to the toolbar with a few clicks and a drag.

There's a brouhaha about Bug 578967, wherein the feed auto-discover icon in the Firefox 4 Beta has been hidden by default. Being a feed nerd, the author of a book on the stuff, and a Mozilla employee—I've got at least a few opinions.

This post is one of several on this subject.

Feeds are too ubiquitous to need an indicator

Feeds are so successful and ubiquitous that it's simpler to assume every site has one, rather than keeping an un-lit indicator around to tell you when one's missing. So, Firefox 4 has an option in the bookmark menu to subscribe to the current page:

The only indicator of a missing feed is that the menu item greys out. Since feeds are everywhere, you should feel comfortable reaching for that subscription menu whenever you like. Of course, this assumes that subscribing to a page falls into the same thought process as bookmarking it—but I don't think that's an unreasonable notion.

On the other hand, if you didn't know that subscribing to a page was possible—or if you worry there might be people (ie. the potential readers of your feeds) who are in that position—this change may seem problematic.

I don't think that's an unreasonable notion, either. But, I'll get back to that in a future post.

The feed icon isn't dead, it's just hiding

Even with the new bookmark menu item, the feed subscription button is still available and ready to return to your toolbar in the Firefox 4 Beta.

First, right-click somewhere in the empty space of your Firefox 4 toolbar. Try somewhere after the tabs, or somewhere between the toolbar buttons. This is how it works on Windows, and this is what it looks like on my Mac:

Click Customize, and you'll get a panel like this:

This lets you customize which buttons and controls appear on the toolbar. If you scroll down in the panel, you'll see a "**Subscribe**" button. Drag that from the panel to a position in the toolbar, and you'll get a result like this: Click "**Done**", and your browser should end up like this: I took my browser screenshots with [Dave Winer's screenshot of the old Firefox feed icon](http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/15/mozillaPleaseKeepTheRssIco.html) for comparison. The result is different, but not radically so. It even enables and darkens when you visit a site with a feed: The main difference is that Dave's screenshot is the default in Firefox 3.6, whereas mine is the result of the last few screenshots of toolbar customization in Firefox 4 beta 9. That customization is easy, if you know it's possible—but the worry is, as they say: out of sight, out of mind.

Archived Comments

Felix Pleșoianu
2011-01-16T08:00:44

I have to take issue with some of your points, based on my personal experience. :)

"Feeds are so successful and ubiquitous that it’s simpler to assume every site has one,"

Um, no. I follow a hundred webcomics, and while the situation has gotten better recently, many of them still don't have a feed. That's not unique to webcomics, either. Lack of a newsfeed is common enough that being able to tell at first glace is very useful. Heck, many people, even website owners, are ignorant of RSS. More about that in a moment.

Besides, the feed button serves a second purpose, which is to allow easy access to the feed. Just as I don't want to hunt for an "RSS" or "XML" link inside the website, I don't want to hunt for it in the browser's interface.

Last but not least, many people still don't know about RSS. That big prominent orange icon is a big auto-discovery feature, not just in the technical sense, but also because a newbie could see it and click it out of curiosity, and thus learn about feeds. I had to explain what RSS is to someone whose browser didn't have one, and that proved to be quite difficult.

Of course, all this talk is for nothing as the decision has already been made but, you know. Just my two cents.
Bruce Wayne
2011-01-16T11:34:59

Nice explaination But by removing the rss indicator Firefox has shifted content aggregation control from an open browser to closed siloed companies. There is no valid excuse for this.... Even the one you have eloquently made.... I'm quiet certain that with this decision Firfox will speed up it's demise...Just to let you know... we are close to launching several application platforms for consumers that use RSS as as a content transport protocol
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:38:58

Feeds are too ubiquitous to need an indicator

So why do i need to resort to Yahoo Pipes so often on sites i want to see updates on?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:36:00
  
  I don't know why you need to resort to Yahoo Pipes so often—what kinds of sites are you trying to subscribe to? I haven't touched Yahoo Pipes in years, and I have 1000 feeds in Google Reader, having amassed them over the course of 8 years or so.
  That said, I know there are exceptions—I'm being optimistic in my explanation here. In my experience, most sites really do have feeds.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:14:50
    
    Web Comics, Web 1.0 blogs, software download listings, just to mention a few.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-17T16:13:18
      
      Those sound like exceptions to me—that, or sites whose owners have intentionally chosen not to offer feeds. Either way, the feed icon doesn't really help you there anyway.
      - Meepmeepmeep
        2011-01-17T18:42:08
        
        Of course it does. Its existence leads to more people using it, which translates into pressure on webmasters to implement it.
        
        THAT is the whole damn point of why everyone is upset. Its existence may not be a strong pressure, but it is a constant one. It going away means less webmasters will bother to implement rss feeds. This is a plain fact.
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:48:09

out of sight, out of mind.

Wow, you seriously have not managed to understand that that is the ENTIRE crux of the issue?

Dead or hidden does not matter, because it does the exact same thing: It means less people will realize RSS feeds exist and are useful.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:31:21
  
  No, I understand that's the crux of the worry. But barely anyone's using that button anyway—so if the whole existence and usefulness of RSS feeds rest on that one icon, feeds are in big trouble.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:12:38
    
    barely anyone’s using that button anyway
    
    Complete fallacy. 3% out of the group participating in a time-limited beta test clicked on the button during that timeframe to subscribe to new feeds.
    
    Now ponder how often you discover new feeds in comparison to how often you use the reload button.
    
    It just plain has a different use model. A more realistic measurement would've been to compare how often an rss preview was opened via the button versus a link on the page itself.
    - l.m.orchard
      2011-01-17T16:36:15
      
      If you think that'd be an interesting study, go ahead and propose it to the Test Pilot team: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/
      - Meepmeepmeep
        2011-01-17T18:45:07
        
        I've tweeted at them, since their site does not provide an email i can send something at. If you know of an email address of theirs or better, an actual chat contact, please let me know.
      - l.m.orchard
        2011-01-17T20:34:39
        
        I don't think there's a direct email contact, but the Test Pilot / Labs site lists all of these things:
        
        Forums - http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-testpilot/topics
        
        Proposals - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Test_Pilot#Propose_and_develop_Test_Pilot_studies
        
        IRC - irc://irc.mozilla.org/labs
Craig Overend
2011-01-16T13:06:07

Feed discovery is already a pain in the arse, now it's made even harder. I'm going to miss the bright orange dropdown icon (until someone brings it back as an add-on). Does the new "space wasting" icon drop down with the list of feeds still?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:32:29
  
  Both the icon and the subscribe menu list the available feeds. Have you tried the new beta?
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T16:13:16

More flat out wrong stuff:

subscribing to a page falls into the same thought process as bookmarking it—but I don’t think that’s an unreasonable notion.

It is completely and utterly unreasonable.

One bookmarks a page to be able to quickly visit it later and directly.

One subscribes to its feed in order to avoid having to actually visit it at all.

I sincerely hope i do not need to explain how these concepts are completely and utterly opposed to each other.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:33:47
  
  I disagree. To me, the bookmark menu is the place where I manage a long-term relationship with a page. That's where I'm coming from.
  That menu includes all my bookmarklets for sharing, making new bookmarks—and now, subscribing to a page. Makes sense to me. Maybe it would make more sense if the menu was renamed.
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:13:47
    
    a long-term relationship with a page
    
    There are different kinds of relationships.
SilverWave
2011-01-16T17:19:01

I think Mozilla missed fully exploiting RSS in Firefox after a great start with LiveBookMarks...

You can fix it like I did with some small add-ons...

I use Boox with Places Full Tiles and Stay-Open Menu. Then all your feeds are on the BookMark Toolbar and easily accessible, bolded if unread.

RSS nirvana.

Oh yeah - sorry but put the RSS icon back !

Heh ;-)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:31:49
  
  I actually agree that Mozilla (and Microsoft, and Apple, and Google) have missed out on exploiting RSS by not going beyond Live Bookmarks—I'm probably going to write about that in the near future. And, yes, the feed icon can be put back in its former place by way of add-on. But, it won't be going back in Firefox 4
opi
2011-01-16T18:36:51

But if it's not being there by default most of users won't reactivate it so we're going to lose readership. What percent of Firefox users do changes to its chrome? I know I do, but I can dig RSS URI straight from website code.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T23:35:02
  
  The reason it'll no longer be there by default is because it's rarely used. I doubt you got much readership from it in the first place.
@JoeHobot
2011-01-16T18:48:17

Great article my friend. I liked the fact you pointed out "The feed icon isn’t dead, it’s just hiding"

Anyway, hope that FF4 is coming out soon, out of beta release.

Wish you good day now..

Founder of MWD
Andy Gongea
2011-01-16T20:45:36

I understand that the idea is to make the user interface lighter and without any distractions. On the other hand I also understand that a lot of blogs depend on this feature to increase their readers base.

Let's try a scenario somehow similar to the RSS problem. What if, Firefox would be launched with the Navigation Toolbar hidden? How many will enable it?

I have another one, less scary. What if, Tabs on Top would be unchecked by default? How many people will change this setting?

Similar to these scenarios, RSS usage will drop on FF.
- dude
  2011-01-17T03:33:25
  
  Great point. I have an even scarier proposition, what if tabs were a hidden feature?
Felix Pleșoianu
2011-01-17T06:30:09

I forgot to mention something.

Saying that the feed icon is rarely used misses the point big time. There are websites I've been visiting three times a week for years, but I only needed to click the feed icon once. That's what feeds are for: to spare you from manually clicking a button to check for updates.

Statistics are great, but they don't substitute for common sense.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:38:43
  
  So, if you only use it once per site, then why should it be there in the toolbar all the time for every site? My common sense tells me that's a good candidate to put somewhere less obtrusive. Beyond that, the feature still does everything else you mention.
  - Felix Pleșoianu
    2011-01-18T07:00:57
    
    "So, if you only use it once per site, then why should it be there in the toolbar all the time for every site?"
    
    For the same reason you have fire hydrants everywhere in a city, even if they are very rarely used. Heck, ideally you should never need them; but would you advocate taking them out?
    
    I gave a bunch of reasons why the RSS feed icon is good in my first comment. And I hope all of them were already known, and have been weighted, when the decision was made.
Michael K Pate
2011-01-17T17:53:19

In Chrome, I have the RSS Subscription Extension (by Google). Now in Firefox, I guess I will be installing RSS Icon every time (or at least as soon as it is updated).

I still regard the decision to break functionality as disappointing, though.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:40:45
  
  This is one of those things I file under not pleasing everyone. I'm guessing there are lots of people who are just fine with it, and so aren't a part of these discussions. How much outrage has there been over Chrome lacking a feed icon by default, versus people praising Chrome's UI simplicity over Firefox?
  - dude
    2011-01-18T02:43:52
    
    I read more about Firefox starting slow, Chrome being responsive, than I do praise for "Chrome's UI simplicity", and yes, people do harp on Chrome for the lack of a feed icon as well.
Danny
2011-01-18T19:23:44

If my own experience is anything to go on, the feed icon's benefit in spreading the idea of feeds is being highly exaggerated in some of the comments here. It was a very long time before I noticed it, for pages without an icon in them I would do View Source to find the alternate links.

On the other hand, I reckon having something in the bookmarks menu would give more exposure to people who want to do more with a given resource (bookmarking and subscribing to feeds are both rather unidirectional relationships!).

In fact it would be really useful to have a fully integrated, user-accessible system for handling all such things, ideally one that could be transparently shifted to the Web (with appropriate access control). A built-in HTTP server would be a good start (is there one yet?), plus support for (say) Atom protocol for shoving data out. This could make it a lot easier to work with semi-social sites like del.icio.us and Bloglines. It's notable that these kind of tools have traditionally been very server-driven, with browsers playing (limited) catch up with plugins. Why can't the client set the agenda for a while?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-19T03:16:41
  
  FWIW: Firefox Sync does some shifting of things to the web. It's a pretty dumb store, providing just enough structure for the client to push encrypted hunks of data into a storage cloud shared between devices. But, it is a bespoke API for sync and not composed from standards like Atom.
  
  As for a built-in HTTP server... I've been toying with the idea of playing with something like that since I started poking at the new add-on API and seeing a lot in common with node.js. It seems like that's getting easier soon
Dexter
2011-05-03T13:14:26

Thanks for your explanation. Even though it is helpful, FF's decision is still a step back. Fortunatelly, there are addon developers that help fixing FF's stepabacks: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-icon/

What happened to feed auto-discovery in Firefox 4?

2011-01-15T16:18:56+00:00

TL;DR: The feed button is not dead; it's just been sent to sing backup in Firefox 4 because it's not pulling its weight. This post talks about why things have changed.

This post is one of several on this subject.

Defaults are hard to pare down

The feed icon still lives in the Firefox 4 Beta; it's just not there by default any more. But, if you look at the controls available in the toolbar customization panel, you'll notice a lot of things that don't show up by default—there are a lot of things in there, period.

This is the dilemma for the Firefox User Experience team at Mozilla: Like it or not, one of the main themes of this next generation of browsers is minimalism—faster, smaller, less browser to get in the way of what you're browsing. Yet, at the same time, Firefox 4 has the features of Firefox 3.6 and more.

You can't just cram it all in there, so what gets prime real estate by default? People say it's just a few pixels, that feed button—but is it so much more important than anything else that could go there? And before you answer, consider that not just for your personal use, but for the 100's of millions of people using Firefox. How do you check your own biases and make a decision on that scale? You could make an educated guess, make a gut check. A lot of brilliant design happens that way.

You can also gather some telemetry from beta installs to see what people really use. Looking at a heatmap of clicks, the feed button is an absolute stinker. This isn't a random whim of the UX team—seriously, it's an order of magnitude less used than anything else in the toolbar (notice the one black spot):

There have been comments dismissing the validity of that heatmap study. But, as far as I can tell, none of them really stick. So, for the sake of argument and a shorter blog post, let's assume barely anyone is using the feed icon and that it's not pulling its weight in this new age of browser minimalism.

Keep in mind that Firefox isn't the only browser to deprioritize the feed button: Google Chrome doesn't even have a feed button at all, and for many people that's the gold standard for minimal browser UI:

Serving the users

Let's hammer on the point of disuse some more—what's the payoff for clicking that thing, anyway?

+1 — You get an option to create a Live Bookmark, which is really handy for things like Bugzilla searches or light headline reading. (I like those so much that I tried building them on the server at Delicious once, but we never quite worked it out at scale.)
0 — You get a list of sites to which Firefox will delegate subscription, if you happen to have installed a content handler. Useful if you know what it's about; a mystery if you don't—not much more useful than a bookmarklet, to me.
-1 — You get a plainly-styled version of what you were probably already looking at on a site, something I criticized back in 2006, like some are criticizing the feed icon change now. (At the time, I was working for a marketing company, and the change cost me days trying to incorporate branding in feeds on a client's site. I think we gave up after a bit, but I suspect that FeedBurner built a nice business routing around that change.)

That's been status quo for years, and it's less than compelling—I've even had people ask me if they broke the page when the button was clicked on accident.

So, given little reward for clicking that feed icon, pushing it into the background in its current state is a service to the users of Firefox. In other words, that feed button has to get a lot more interesting if it's going to serve alongside UI all-stars like Back, Reload, and Location.

Hell, even with Firebug installed, I use View Source more than the feed button these days, and I've never stuck that on the toolbar.

Leading the web

The most compelling response I've seen to the "removal" of the feed auto-discovery button is the challenge that Mozilla and other browser makers should be improving feed-related features, rather than pushing them into the background. With this, I wholeheartedly agree—but I'm not entirely sure what to do about it.

So, there's a balance here: Make the experience of the web better by improving how Firefox handles what's already out there, and make the web itself better by building more powerful and enabling technologies into Firefox and other products. In the best of times, Mozilla can do and has done both at once. WebGL and technologies associated with HTML5 represent great examples of this.

But, alas, syndication feeds in the browser have stagnated. The feed button has been a weak feature for years. In the meantime, other things have taken priority in the Firefox project. The rise of Twitter and Facebook and more complex applications on the web have reduced the need for most people to interact directly with feeds, so demands for attention to the feed button haven't exactly topped the charts in comparison to things like making sure Flash doesn't crash the browser and getting super fast for everything else.

Ship it!

In the end, Mozilla has a browser to ship. The decision on the feed button has been made and, believe it or not, with a great deal of thought behind it.

I know that this is the first time many people have heard of this change, but many already have heard and have given the UX team a number of earsful. Coming in at this late stage and requesting—nay demanding—a reversal of that decision will do nothing but piss off all the people who've been banging away at this and many other things up to now. They're people who've worked hard, stayed up late—and the last thing anyone wants to do is rehash every conversation ever about the topic.

Archived Comments

Jacques
2011-01-16T07:22:31

I understand that we always try to enhance UI of any software and that it takes a lot of time and discussions to make decisions. And some decisions may not please everyone.

As for the Feed button, the one in the toolbar customization panel does not highlight when there are feeds available or change colour when there are no feeds. You need to click on it to see if Firefox 4 discovered feeds of not.

In Firefox 3.6, you don't need to guess or click on a button to find if a feed is available.

So instead of a feed button that is always shown, feed available or not, it's much more usable to show a button that highlight properly (takes more space), or is shown only when feeds are available (optimal space use).

Using a heatmap of clicks does not do justice to the feeds button, since it's of no use to click on it in Firefox 3.6 to instantly see if or not there is a feeds available.

There are other information that have been removed in Firefox 4 that are open to discussion.

For example, a heatmap does not show loading icons, throbbers, urls loading in the status bar, "done" message in the status bar, etc. In fact, any status information won't show up in a clicks heatmap. So if that information does not show up in a clicks heatmap, it does not mean these statuses must be removed from the UI.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:25:30
  
  Actually, the Feed button in the toolbar does change state depending on the presence or absence of feeds: It's enabled and clickable with a feed, and greys out without a feed. I mentioned that in the post. If that's not noticeable enough for you, then that's a separate bug specific to that button.
  
  As for the validity of the heatmap—what would you suggest get done as an alternative? There's no way to fit a large number of beta users with eye-tracking gear. Also, I personally don't buy that people just like to have the feed indicator around because it's nice to see it light up. It's a call to action (eg. subscribe to this site)—and if barely anyone takes that action, how valuable can it be?
Giuliano
2011-01-16T08:40:45

And if you really miss the feed-autodiscovery feature, just use RSS Icon In Awesombar. ;)
- dude
  2011-01-17T03:17:05
  
  RSS/Atom are standardized web features, it's a shame we have to rely on 3rd parties to enable support. At least Google has an official RSS extension so I can trust the security of the addon, but still, both Mozilla and Google are going backwards on this.
voracity
2011-01-16T11:07:30

Well argued. I am a little disappointed with its removal because RSS is a distributed status update mechanism, and we're currently being swamped by centralised status update mechanisms (twitter and whatnot). But the experience has always been seriously crap (to put it bluntly), so better to remove it until it improves I suppose.

Sadly, my guess is that once its removed, it will never reappear.
antistress
2011-01-16T11:27:15

i agree with the new UI concerning feed subscription (along with bookmarks).

But there is indeed a concern with Firefox 4 concerning feeds. Since Firefox doesn't really handle feeds, Sync doesn't care about them either. Therefore if you have installed an add-on to deal with feeds, they will not be synchronized and that's not a good experience for the user. Bookmarks are synchronized but feeds are not, whereas they supposed to belong to the same scheme
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:04:24
  
  Good points. I'd say there are lots of things Firefox could do better with feeds in general.
Pavel Cvrcek (Mozilla.cz)
2011-01-16T11:29:40

I think this is right decision even I'm one of the people who use RSS button which is inside location bar. But we have extensions right? Because this function is important for me I created extension RSS Icon In Awesombar which brings this button back to the location bar.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/rss-icon-in-awesombar/
Meepmeepmeep
2011-01-16T11:34:59

The only reason i'll even get to see your follow-up entries to this is because my browser includes an rss reader and a button that tells me you have an rss feed for your blog.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:38:06
  
  So, you mean to tell me that you didn't already think my blog had a feed, before you looked for the feed icon?
  - dude
    2011-01-17T03:22:53
    
    Are you surprised he would be more likely to find an RSS button on his toolbar than somewhere on the side of the page? Or that someone wouldn't assume that all blogs have RSS, especially many older ones? Or that asking Google Reader to test if a URL had a feed is a whole lot more cumbersome than using the browser to get Google Reader to subscribe to it?
  - Meepmeepmeep
    2011-01-17T09:08:24
    
    Yes.
    
    I stumble upon too many blogs of various kinds that have no feeds to make the assumption that every blog has one. As i mentioned on your other post, Yahoo Pipes is a tool i often need to resort to.
    
    Maybe you need to step outside your Web 2.0 bubble sometime?
Janusz Lewandowski
2011-01-16T12:12:53

I suggest removing the Scroll Left button, it's used only by 1% of Fx users.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:28:22
  
  I'm pretty sure removing the Scroll Left button was discussed—if only for a minute—and a call was made that basic spatial navigation was more important than feeds.
dude
2011-01-16T21:25:26

Janusz, I totally agree, let's remove the site identity, remove bookmark, more info, scroll right, print menu item, save page as, bookmarks all tab, etc., they are obviously never used.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:07:20
  
  Pretty much all of those you list are used more than twice as much as the feed icon, or don't appear on the toolbar at all.
Jim L.
2011-01-16T21:32:14

I can put "View Source" in the toolbar? How?!
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-16T21:40:34
  
  Actually, for "View Source", I installed the Web Developer add-on. So, that's not built-in like I implied.
Tulapi
2011-01-16T22:23:44

Why do you care about this "Back" button, "Location bar" and so on ? Just put one big "facebook" button and one big "google" button, it's enough...

With this kind of decisions, I think you are not "building a better Internet" as Mozilla Foundation is supposed to do.

RSS and twitter are very different ways to access information, with their "+" and "-". Leaving RSS dying seems to me a regression. I am sorry, but when I read "The rise of Twitter and Facebook and more complex applications on the web have reduced the need for most people to interact directly with feeds", I am a bit frightened, because I understand it a bit like : "Hey guy, why don't you go on Facebook like everybody to surf the web. It's cool and your friends tell you what is interesting to read".

I don'k know about the usability of the feed concept, it could be certainly improved, but I really felt it was going towards "give people tools to take control of their online lives" (Mozilla Mission)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T00:14:38
  
  So, I did say that Twitter and Facebook has left users with less need to interact with feeds—but I didn't say that I liked it. I'm the last person who'd want closed silos to own the web, and I want to see RSS and Atom and other open web technologies grow.
  - dude
    2011-01-17T03:25:24
    
    I'm currently a Chrome user, wishing that 1 day Firefox will go back to why I liked it in the first place. I've been subsribing to Twitter feeds and Facebook pages more than I have with feeds with Chrome, not only because the prior are established, but also because Chrome doesn't encourage RSS with its exclusion. I don't bother with addons either, I don't think most users do either (yet Mozilla decides addons need a whole bar).
Andrew
2011-01-17T01:39:38

I can't be the only person who, when I decide I want to subscribe to a site, looks for the RSS Icon on the page first before I ever even glance at the auto-discovery icon. In many cases, especially on larger sites, I rarely want what they would consider the "main" feed anyway and on the sites where I do want that, their feed is usually in a place that's easily clicked on.

So, in my case, it was needless clutter that I'm rather happy to see getting removed by default. Of course, I remove a lot more than that from Firefox's chrome, but at least this is one less thing I have to do manually.
fflover
2011-01-17T16:26:58

Sir, looks like you know a lot about FF. Is it a conscious decision to not have Awesombar as the default search bar .i hate it when it gives me google search results. if i type bbc news and hit enter, it should take me to bbc news site, right? not a google search of it? If there is any way i can get my awesombar back, please let me know.

Sincerely, fflover :)
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T17:33:17
  
  Sounds like you might be interested in this add-on:
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/luckybar/
ffuser
2011-01-17T19:40:00

beta users is not equal to representative user population. how much percent of all Firefox users does your study cover, is it enough to make statistical conclusions?
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-17T20:46:23
  
  Well, it's not my study, it's the Test Pilot team's study. I'd say it's a decent chunk of users, with some interesting segmentation. But, that's my opinion. If you have an idea of how to execute a study that covers more, feel free to let the Test Pilot team know.
Doug Bromley
2011-01-18T08:46:09

Wow. There's a lot of strong feelings flying around. Well as one of the silent majority I'd just like to offer my support to the removal. I never used the feed button and whenever I wanted a sites feed I normally scanned the page I was on for an icon to click.
Olivier
2011-01-18T18:03:16

Thank you for your post. I, too, would rather have the button clutter up a little than risk RSS being less discovered. But I understand your point and respect your decisions.
rektide
2011-01-22T02:17:52

your metric for evaluating the utility of the feed button -- click rate -- is about as incorrect and contrary as possibly can be conceived.

the entire point of the feed button is that you only need to click it once for a site. after a user clicks it, the user shouldn't have to click it again on that site, and, going further, shouldn't even have to visit the site. those are the signals for success.

if you want a useful metric, dont look at how often the button is clicked. that's entirely the purpose of what it's trying to avoid. look at return rates for sites where a user has clicked the feed button. if you see a precipitous drop in return rates, you know the button is functioning completely as desired. the bigger the drop, the less users return, the better the button works.

baby HCI jesus is weeping in his crib.
- l.m.orchard
  2011-01-22T08:45:28
  
  So... if it only gets used once per site, then it doesn't belong in the same toolbar with navigational controls that get used constantly. It's a special action, used rarely. Thus, it's in the bookmark menu now - you know, bookmarks, another thing you ideally do once per site if at all.
  
  But as I've said in other comments, if you feel strongly enough, come up with a study to propose to the Test Pilot team and spread your HCI jesus gospel

Let a million bookmarks bloom

2010-12-19T21:26:38+00:00

TL;DR: Don't depend on Delicious; host your own, pay for it elsewhere, or hope for the best. Use real-time feeds to stitch the bookmarking diaspora back together into topical aggregate indexes.

In the last entry, I wrote about why my use of Delicious has dropped over time, and what I've been missing as a result. In short, I think there's place for something like Delicious, and I'd like to get back to it.

Update: See also, "We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think" from Stephen Hood, one of my former Delicious co-workers. He covers some more good angles I didn't get around to here.

Active thoughts

So, it's true Yahoo! announced that they're "actively thinking about the future of Delicious" and that "we believe there is a home outside the company". But, none of that says they've found a home or that it will be easy to transplant if they do. In the meantime, there's a lot of uncertainty and probably only an overworked skeleton crew left onboard.

Much of Delicious now depends on home-grown technology that is shared by many other Yahoo! properties. This should not be a surprise: Beyond the money, that was kind of the point of selling to Yahoo! in particular. As a major search company in 2005, they presumably had the indexing mojo help scale it up. So, transferring the site to a new technology stack will definitely figure into the value proposition of anyone looking to take over Delicious.

In short, any buyers of Delicious will have their hands full—probably more so than Yahoo! did when they first bought it. Don't hold your breath for a bright future.

Who cares?

What it comes down to this:

If you use Delicious regularly, you care about your bookmarks.
If you're part of an interest group, you care about their bookmarks and they about yours.
If you're a random web surfer, you care about finding things relevant to your interests.
If you're Yahoo!—well, I would have thought you cared about building a human-powered index of the web, but who knows where your collective heads are at these days.

The important thing is that no owners of Delicious will care in particular about #1 and #2—that is, your bookmarks and those of your colleagues. If they care about anything, it's the overall value of a well-indexed set of web resources to #3 and how they can monetize that.

In other words: If they can't figure out how to monetize the aggregate index, don't expect them to start caring about your data. See also: If you're not paying for it; you're the product.

What now?

Find someone else to host your bookmarks, maybe you yourself. Think about helping move and/or hosting your colleagues' collections. In particular, look for someone whose motivations are aligned with your own—by way of either money or common interest.

There are plenty of services stepping in to take over from Delicious. I like pinboard.in, because it's very close to the original Delicious, will capture links from other modern services, and it charges you money for valuable features.

There are also a few self-hosted substitutes, and there will more in the weeks to come. Some take these weekend projects as fodder to discount Delicious in general, but they're missing the point: The basic features of Delicious were never particularly complex—it's scaling those features up to web scale that's hard in a single service.

But, you may not need web scale. Also, hosting is getting cheaper every day. Gamers host servers for themselves and their friends, so why not start thinking about hosting a social bookmarking server for interesting people by invite? If you don't have the technical chops yourself, you probably know someone who does.

If this kerfluffle with Delicious does nothing else, it should really get us thinking about hosting our own stuff again. Cheap hosting is not just for startups.

And after that?

I'd love to see a million social bookmarking sites bloom, both as new public services and self-hosted sites for friends. What this diaspora would lack, though, is the awesomeness of seeing everything tagged "webdev" and who else bookmarks things you like. What made Delicious hard is what made it interesting, and it's possible that no one service will ever again reach a critical mass in social bookmarking.

But, I don't think Delicious could have scaled up forever and stayed interesting. To address this, I advocated breaking Delicious up into semi-porous cells around loosely defined interest groups. Basically, a lot like what Reddit does with subreddits and what the Stack Exchange network does with Q&A topics.

As it was, Delicious had grown up around an implicit interest group of webdevs, programmers, tech heads, and the like. So, I figured that spawning more cells would be more interesting than just shoving endless people into the existing one. I also thought it could help scale the site in terms of server architecture, since cells of relevance could be fairly independent.

The problem with a delicious diaspora, though, is the opposite: Scattered sites will offer fragments of larger communities that may not find each other on their own. So, we might like to find a way to piece them back together.

Luckily, I think we have the technology to rebuild Delicious at web scale.

A tasty future, maybe?

Assume that lots of people have tagged bookmark collections in lots of places. What if those sites all supported PubSubHubBub and/or RSS Cloud across feeds by dimensions of tag, user, and URL?

I think you'd have the makings of a loosely coupled and distributed Delicious:

The motivation to maintain individual and group bookmark collections could match up better with those who care about them. You could use pinboard.in. You could host your own bookmarks. You could be a minor hero and host those of the people you find interesting.

Then, imagine a layer of search engines, each specializing in collecting a topically-interesting mix of real-time feeds from an array of social bookmarking sites. A future Google could subscribe to hubs pings from all the above and build something interesting and valuable without hosting the bookmarks of pesky, demanding users.

I don't think this is super-science rocket surgery. Oddly enough, this is close to how I hoped we'd restructure Delicious back in the 2.0 days. It's what I was getting at with my "Queue everything, delight everyone" post. I wanted to see us treat individual users' collections as isolated from the aggregate indexes, connected only by messages and queues. I'm not sure we ended up with something as de-coupled as that, but I didn't have enough visibility into the deep backend to say for sure. Either way, I think this could be an opportunity to address things at web scale without a single company running the show.

In conclusion

Use the web. Host your own, pay for it, or find someone who values your data.

You don't need a central blog server to have a Google. And you don't need a Delicious to have social bookmarking. It seems like we're drifting away from this as services like Facebook and Twitter rise to swallow whole categories of web application in monolithic silos.

Seriously, hosting is getting cheaper and easier. Use it and host your own. Yeah, cheap is not free, but is what you're doing worthless to you? There are interesting alternatives that don't involve handing everything over to someone who doesn't actually care about you and your stuff.

And, if it turns out that social bookmarking settles down into a small but highly involved niche of curators, so much the better that they keep their own lights on.

Archived Comments

Rogers Cadenhead
2010-12-20T05:44:29

Hosting is cheap.

Running web applications on your own server securely and reliably is expensive, assuming you value your own time.
JB
2010-12-20T10:05:58

I really like this article. There should indeed be a system where you can self-host your bookmarks with some CMS and a centralized site for less techy people. All of these bookmarks would be somehow merged to produce intelligent data. Kind of what Automattic does with WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

Aside, this new Delicious system should have a more "sharing" side with ability for networkers to comment on each bookmark, "redeli" the bookmark (like retweet), etc... Unite bookmark and twitter functions - What Yahoo! should have try to developp during these past five years and failed to. I already tried to find some link posted in the past in my Twitter stream, and it made me really angry and frustrated. And I didn't succeed. Twitter is nice but still has a too bad signal-to-noise ratio : Tweets are way too much passing, impossible to organized, and replies are not enough differentiated from normal tweet.

What could be an ideal way to go is a WordPress plugin. Based on already there custom post type system, tags system, comments sytem... WordPress is already a successful product, widely used. It would make easier the process of leaving current doomed delicious to a decentralized system.

And Automattic should integrate this plugin to their WordPress.com blogs. They even would not have to buy Delicious to Yahoo!, just spread the word and invite people to subscribe to their service and import their delicious data.

Finally, imagine that Automattic creates a subdomain of wordpress.com where all the data (bookmarks and data) would be gathered. The plugin on self hosted blogs would propose to the owner to share his personal bookmarks data with this website via an API. A network could be based on wordpress.com optional subscription.

I don't have any personal or business interest in Automattic (just a WordPress user) but it seems the perfect way to go.
l.m.orchard
2010-12-20T16:49:26

@Rogers: Yeah, I totally glossed over the horrors of sysadmin work and security. I'm kind of bipolar that way. I'm very optimistic about the stuff you can do with all this cheap capacity. But, then, I get my 5th XSS bug of the day to fix and want to change careers.

I tend to think that cheap/disposable VMs and things like Google App Engine can make it easier, though. You can pay for & run just enough to run your app, hopefully keep the maintenance needs down and minimize the attack surface.

I don't think it's that bad for small self-hosted sites like I'm talking about, but then I have a high threshold for crap.
Bill Seitz
2010-12-20T20:09:41
I'm not feeling that optimistic about things like GoogleAppEngine these days.
1. How much is GAE mattering to anyone these days? What does that imply for its long-term survival?
2. WikiLeaks/TOS etc.
l.m.orchard
2010-12-21T02:26:18

@Bill: Well, GAE is mattering to me insofar as it's a decent place to deploy quick python web apps. Of course, that might be bad, since quick python apps aren't really taking advantage of the whole BigTable thing.

As for wikileaks, well... Somebody can always cut you off
Evan Prodromou
2010-12-22T17:55:13

I'd love to get your comments on the Bookmark extension we're working on for StatusNet. It uses OStatus (http://ostatus.org/) for distributing bookmarks (that's PuSH + Activity Streams + Salmon) and the Bookmark object type for AS.

It's shaping up nicely; I'm going to set up a sample site for testing v v soon.

Less del.icio.us than ever before

2010-12-18T22:02:11+00:00

TL;DR: I've not been using Delicious as much lately, having been lured away by simpler sharing services. But, I think there's a lot of metadata value in tagging that I'm missing out on.

In case you're new here, this is who I am with respect to this post: I really like del.icio.us and have done a lot of thinking about it. I was an early del.icio.us user in 2003. I posted 10-20 items per day for a good while. I wrote a book about it, and I worked on it at Yahoo! for a couple of years.

But, especially lately, I've been wandering away:

When I left Yahoo!, I felt so-so about what was going to happen to Delicious. So, I whipped up my own clone using Kohana PHP.

Feel free to grab the code, but it's abandonware. I had great plans for it, but I only got as far as the basic features and a plugin to copy posts back to my original del.icio.us account. That scratched my itches: I had my bookmarks self-hosted, I still posted to Delicious, but I didn't feel particularly compelled to promote the project beyond that. At this point, I'd rather not touch PHP for personal projects, so there you are.

But even with my own self-hosted bookmarks, I've dropped off in general. Until about 2 years ago, I was a madman posting around 10-20 bookmarks a day. Since then, I'm down to less than one a day on average.

What happened? Other channels became rewarding, and my sharing habits fragmented. Google Reader released a sharing bookmarklet, so I started using that. More people I know started using Facebook, so that became more attractive. And, even though it kind of annoys me, I sometimes spam links to Twitter when I think they're particularly interesting.

But now that I think about it, I'm missing out. All these sharing services I've started using are one-click, lazy affairs with no particular drive toward tagging. My only intentional input into the process is to point and nod. Consequently, they facilitate sharing much more than search or recall, in that the richness of metadata extracted from me is reduced. Delicious kind of tricked me into doing all three at once, but newer services are more focused on me as a social entity.

The thing about Delicious is that it wasn't meant for socializing. Rather—as I understood it, at least—it was built to exploit both selfish and social mechanics to extract useful work. In this particular case, the goal was producing interesting collections of things on the web. Compare it to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, only with a non-monetary incentive. Since Joshua Schachter and friends have started Tasty Labs, I expect we'll see them take a shot at applying this notion to other problems.

So anyway, where am I going with this? Oh yeah: I'm using Delicious less these days and I think it's to my detriment. Delicious extracted useful work from me, both for myself and others. It's harder to find things again, thanks to missing metadata and the ephemeral nature of sharing on the real-time web. I think there's a place for Delicious, if only for those of us who like to keep track of what we've found on the web and share the results. I suspect that may be a limited, though highly motivated audience.

What's to be done about it? Well, Delicious is still around, for now. Keep using it, and make regular backups. But, I've got some further thoughts to sort out for another post very soon.