It doesn’t look good for Flash. But Flash isn’t going to die.

Firstly, consider some background. Flash has been around for a very long time, providing a platform for games, vector graphics, animation and media playback. It offers massive market penetration, and of course there is only one Flash player, so it purports to offer a consistent experience across platforms.

However, Flash comes with a number of significant downsides. Firstly, that ‘consistent experience across platforms’ might also be written as ‘inconsistent experiences on every platform’. By taking most of its user interface conventions from Microsoft Windows, the experience of using Flash on a Mac is not the same as using any other app in OSX using native controls. Simple stuff like the behaviour of keyboard chords in text entry controls are different, the text selection colour doesn’t match the system selection; low level stuff.

Similarly, the Flash plug-in itself is cited by Google and Apple as being a massive cause of crashes in their browsers, crashes that the browser maker gets the blame for, but is really caused by Flash. In Google Chrome and in OSX Snow Leopard, plug-ins are sandboxed away from the main browser process. Mozilla lists Flash as the biggest causes of Firefox crashes on Linux.

To top it off, for all the claims of ‘Accessible Flash’ over the past year, Flash content is still only accessible on Windows; on Mac OSX, Flash has no integration with VoiceOver. Screen readers are only supported on Microsoft Windows through the MSAA API.

The iPhone shipped two years ago without Flash support. At the time, some said it was a ‘missing feature’. 24 months later, the iPhone seems to be doing just fine without Flash, and users seem very happy. Adobe have stopped making vapourous comments about having ‘Flash for iPhone’ waiting in the wings.

There are two distinct threads to a Flash vs. HTML 5 discussion. Those are ‘Features’ and ‘Philosophy’. Let’s tackle them separately.

Features

HTML 5 is gaining mind-share because of a handful of key new features that it offers: <video>, <audio> and <canvas>.

The first two are quite self-explanatory, they are new elements dedicated to providing video and audio media directly in the browser, and provides a DOM API for controlling the media from JavaScript. Note, the idea is that the media is played back directly by the browser, not through a plug-in like Quicktime or Windows Media Player (which is how video used to work, before Flash).

This affects Flash because over the past few years, perfectly timed with the rise in available bandwidth to stream audio and video, it provided a solution better than the Quicktime/Windows Media/RealPlayer mangle that came before it. Before, to embed video in pages you needed to provide multiple codecs, depend on bespoke media player UI appearing in your page (all of which was different sizes, and so would break your layout), and half the time your visitors had the wrong version of the plug-in anyway.

Flash stepped in with a solution: Support for more platforms than any one of the other bespoke players, and you could design your own playback UI around it, too.

Flash won video from under the feet of Apple, Microsoft and Real by building something that was better, and bypassing their squabbling over codecs.

But, it’s just a better, bespoke solution. It’s still vendor dependent. Flash provided the use-case for ‘embedding video with author-defined playback controls’. The purpose of standardisation is to take that feature and define it, such that anyone can implement it. From there, comes video and audio in HTML5.

Flash also provides vector drawing tools. It’s another useful use-case (graphing, interactive charts, etc.) Again, the standardisation process for HTML is about taking the use cases from real content on the web and defining it so many people can implement it. canvas (via. Apple) is the implementation for that.

Three major pieces of functionality. Putting them natively into the browser responds to the needs of web developers. That’s what the standard is for. Does this mean that HTML 5 ‘kills’ Flash because previously Flash-only functionality is now native? No. But it means that those major use cases no-longer require Flash. There’s plenty of other, less trivial functionality that Flash supports for which widespread demand does not exist. But of course really common features of web pages are going to be supported in Open Web technology.

Additionally, you may cite sifr — using custom typefaces — as a use-case for Flash. That falls outside of HTML5, but is covered by an increasingly well supported CSS3 feature, @font-face.

Philosophy

I’ve avoided linking Jon Dowdell here as a major source because although he titled his post ‘Adobe on HTML5’, his blog also states that his opinions do not represent his company. His post is representative of Adobe’s general philosophy toward the web, though.

As far as Adobe are concerned, Flash is part of the web. It’s not just an optional, bolt-on plug-in for proprietary content. To Adobe, Flash is as much a part of the web as JavaScript or CSS. They regard is as a legitimate part of the stack.

“the “HTML5” publicity helps marginalize those few who still argue that images, animation, audio/video and rich interactivity have no place on the web. Flash will be able to deliver on those heightened expectations, regardless of what each separate browser engine does.”

The second part of Adobe’s philosophy is that consistent support for functionality on the web is non-negotiable.

“we really do need the ability to predictably deploy advanced capability across a range of device brands and browser brands”

This philosophy is wrong. One: Flash is not part of the web. The web is the Open Web and anything closed and proprietary is just riding on its back. I don’t mean that bespoke plug-ins are unwelcome or even ‘wrong’; they provide all sorts of useful functionality. I do mean that if you are a single-vendor creator of a proprietary, patent and license encumbered, undocumented, closed-source plug-in then you have no claim to be part of the infrastructure of the web. The infrastructure, from TCP/IP upwards, is open.

The consistent support aspect also flies in the face of techniques used with every part of the Open Web stack: Graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, and the fight against the misguided demand for pixel perfection are all battles that have been fought and won since Designing for Web Standards.

The web is about content. Everything above that is dressing (perhaps think of the web as fresh bread, perfectly coated in balsamic vinegar and olive oil). The fact that older browsers cannot render all the features of your page but can still provide the content to users is a feature. It’s the most important feature.

The Flash philosophy is opposite. Flash is about a complete experience (singular). It’s about every detail being precisely bevelled into place for every viewer. The consequence of this approach is that it resists the availability of content. The goal of perfect consistent rendering can only be achieved through a single version of this single vendor’s bespoke plug-in. If you need a feature of Flash 10, Flash 9 users must upgrade to see any of your content, not just the new feature.

The Flash approach is anti-content; anti-web. Adobe present the idea that Flash is a superior offering because the entire suite of features, in one big blob, is a compelling development offering. But the reason to write on the web in the first place is to make content available broadly.

In recent years, through multimedia, fonts and and vector drawing, we’ve seen more and more blocks of content moved into Flash, in the absence of a robust standards-based mechanism. HTML5 redresses that by supporting those use cases. HTML4 supports pictures. HTML5 supports moving pictures. HTML5 supports what people publish on the web.

Fuss

What is the fuss about? HTML5 doesn’t compete with Flash as a product, (you could never produce an implementable specification for so much functionality in one go). It just takes some specific, common use-cases for web content and supports them.

Yet, people on one side are crying for the absolute death of Flash, and clearly some from Adobe are on the defensive to outright dismiss the HTML5 effort.

Critics may be motivated by any number of those negative user-experiences this article opened with, but Flash won’t die. If HTML5 takes away one use-case that Flash fulfils, Adobe Flash will add new features that browsers don’t have. That’s what plug-ins have always done. Flash can and will iterate faster than browsers and can deploy wider all at once. That said, some of those existing use cases — namely video playback — are extremely lucrative for Adobe. Video took Flash from ‘optional’ to ‘essential’ for a certain slice of web content. The video sharing industry is dependent on Flash.

Adobe will lose their exclusive grip on that. But, what did they expect? That a massively profitable industry would tie themselves to a single vendor?

Flash offers only one advantage to video on the web, and I think this one will be genuinely interesting to see turned into a marketed feature. The HTML5 method of embedding video looks like this:

<video src='http://example.org/video/foo.mp4'></video>

There’s the URL to your video file, right there in the HTML source, downloaded in raw form. What can Adobe offer publishers? Two ‘features’ of software that run absolutely counter to the principals of the open web: DRM and obfuscation.

That could be interesting. The survival of Adobe Flash Video online will require them to take the closed, anti-content consequence of Flash’s model, and instead embrace it as a feature for media companies that fear distribution of their content.

Really, I think this whole issue is overblown. Maybe it’s all fuelled by scare-mongering from individuals Adobe, maybe it’s over-eager Open Web evangelists eager to see closed and proprietary scraped from the face of the web. In reality, it’s just the pragmatic, ongoing evolution of the web offering useful new functionality.

I was there for my work with microformats, and as someone who periodically pops up to suggest improving the user experience of OAuth.

People

MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, Open Social and OpenID. All under one roof. Everyone quite keen to move in positive directions. An exciting mix.

It was quite something to spend two days in these surroundings, participating in the conversations that determine what happens next. As is my nature though, perhaps the biggest value came through observation and listening. And to cut to the chase, herein lies my principal learning of Foocamp:

The Open Stack needs a Product

Foo had many, many sessions on the Open Stack; OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial and Portable Contacts. Some of them concerned with user experience, some with data portability and distributed identity, some with the processes of open development itself. Every single one of those sessions at the very least mentioned Facebook. But more often, the sessions were outright dominated by Facebook Connect.

A session on building a start-up on the Open Stack was turned into a discussion about Facebook’s product, and what developers wanted from it.

Note the emphasis on Facebook’s product. The way in which we classify the technology of the open, social web and compare it to Facebook Connect is massively flawed.

Get this clear: Facebook Connect, from inception through API through user experience, is a single, self-contained, beautifully packaged product for developers. And it’s awesome. Facebook has the combination of detailed, well maintained user data, a huge user-base and excellent user interface design for the Connect experience. It ticks every box.

Compare to ‘the Open Stack’. There is no product. These are technologies — wonderful technologies — with which you could build something with the functionality of Facebook Connect. But at time of writing, there is no mature offering. The branded products from Yahoo and Google are not as strong as Facebook; they’re less mature in every way. Problematically, though, the tools have a stronger brand than the implementations.

It’s this that causes the Facebook/Open Web comparison to fall down so quickly. The open technologies are right and true. Using the same open auth and identity protocols is a massive win for developers. But what are you actually implementing?

The open stack itself doesn’t contain any data, nor provide any service. It is just the mechanism to provide those services. You don’t solve anything by ‘integrating OAuth’. OAuth isn’t a service. The publicity has to shift to actual service providers, where the end users are involved. Because really, it’s touching those end users that drives developers, not beautiful snowflakes.

We’re all imagining a world where you can implement OpenID+OAuth+PoCo and seamlessly integrate with Google, Yahoo! and any other social network using the same code. But that doesn’t exist yet. Only the foundations of it exist. And without the data provision from actual products, there’s no implementation to focus the open stack discussion on.

Not broken

Whilst it all sounds a bit bleak, nothing here is broken. Facebook has a massive head-start in the marketplace. Yahoo, Google, MySpace et al are playing catch-up in terms of the APIs and the user experiences of their own sites. Is Yahoo! Updates as rich an experience as Facebook? Not yet, no. There’s work happening everywhere to compete, across all aspects of all services. As such, of course Facebook is the more compelling option this year; it’s obvious that’s the case.

Further, as evidenced by Facebook’s Open Stream API launch last week, their strategy has been formidably well planned. Over the past twelve months they’ve been hit with sticks by openness advocates for being locked away in their walled garden, but their priorities have been elsewhere. They’ve been building a rock solid foundation that, once in place (now), they can start to open up and offer good data from the start. They have the luxury of the market lead, and they can use that to release better, more complete services. That’s their reward for being first, and they’ve earned it.

So, the feeling I come out with is that we should stop thinking about Facebook in the context of open standards (except where they implement them, of course). It’s a broken comparison. It’s hard, because the competitors have everything in the air at once, but it’s down to them over the coming months to turn their adolescent, open-powered APIs into compelling products. The part OAuth plays in this is just to continue becoming as transparent to users as possible.

It’s not the job of OAuth and OpenID as part of this ‘Open Stack’ to take on Facebook in mindshare. The roles of these APIs (PoCo, Open Social and Activity Streams included) is to be expected and taken for granted in any new implementation. These are the bricks on which houses are built. But people don’t buy bricks, and so our eyes need to focus on the products of this work.

The other point to stress here is that whilst the open stack needs stronger implementations, they don’t have to be ‘NotFacebook Connect’. That’s only one use for these standards. The big Open Web offering could be somewhat different. Better, even.

Be excited. The struggle of Open standards vs. Facebook is a fallacy, they’re just efforts a little out of sync. This year, with maturing, big products powered by open technologies, we’ll see things built that extend beyond the achievements of Facebook’s walled garden age. MySpace, Google, Yahoo! et al are all moving together toward something quite special. Developers will be able to take on exciting new, provider agnostic apps with this technology. Just accept that the second generation of competitors need a little time and encouragement to build out.

Oh, and don’t be surprised to see Facebook active in all this, too. In the end, they’ll be as open as anyone else.

Microformats.org is an interesting beast to work for. An informally arranged organisation of volunteers, overseeing a broad array of subject areas and points of interaction. 2008 was my first full year of administrative involvement with the group, for what value of ‘administration’ there really is.

This post is on my personal blog because there is no official line of policy at microformats.org. What I write here is just personal intent and what we achieve in the next twelve months is down to shared passions and collaboration, not the will of one person.

There are shared priorities, of course. The past few months have seen a surge of work on the awkwardly named value excerption ; a mark-up pattern and parsing rule derived from hCard. Honestly, I didn’t know ‘excerption’ was a real word until I started leading the work on this. Thankfully, naming is not as important as a good spec.

Basically, value-excerption in hCard got implemented in parsers globally, so we’re trying spec it more fully to reflect that. It’s a pattern for structuring data values, so in the process we can extend it do something to offer solutions to some long standing accessibility and localisation complaints. The work is sporadic; two weeks here, a month off there. That’s just how it happens. Being absent from Yahoo! this last month has helped me pull it together into a massive public test effort.

My other big task in 2008 was redesigning the microformats wiki, bringing it into line with the look and feel of microformats.org, adapting Dan Cederholm’s still-lovely design. It’s a piece of work I’m proud of, and besides being able to junk vast quantities of MediaWiki’s questionable and bloated default mark-up, it of allowed me to put microformats into the wiki mark-up itself: Each page is now an hAtom entry, with an hCalendar event for the last-modification date of the page.

This Year

I don’t care to dissect last year too heavily. It’s this year I’m excited about. There’s work coming to completion, there’s ongoing work that’s nearly ready to break cover, ongoing infrastructure improvements brewing and a desire to see a big step up in microformats toolkits for developers.

1. First up, I want to see the value-excerption work seen out within the next couple of months. Testing is going really well right now; it’s an effort beyond the scale of anything else we’ve done before. Knowing the accessibility and localisation issues we’re trying to overcome, it’s vital that we get it right. We can’t afford to push something that doesn’t solve the problems and complaints of authors as well as we can. I’m taking suggestions for a beer or red wine magnificent enough to open when we call this one ‘done’.

2. Secondly, we’ve built up a number of issues and enhancement requests against the core microformats — hCard and hCalendar. They’re stable, useful and are helping to change the web, but iterating stably is an important step to take as the community and formats mature. Just as HTML5 is not versioned like a piece of software, there won’t be an ‘hCard 2’. This is the web and we won’t be breaking existing pages or forking our specifications; that’s absurd. We will evolve. I would like a period of active editing and hope to see hCard and hCalendar ’Second Edition’ published this year.

3. Recipe and Audio formats. Two new drafts in 2008. Bearing in mind that many popular and quite stable formats like hReview and hAtom are actually still in draft, that’s a very significant step — it takes a lot of research and brainstorming to put together a good draft spec. These subjects have much stronger, stable momentum than some previous microformat proposals have had, so I’m confident they’ll move smoothly. Structured publishing of music and food is highly Relevant To My Interests. I worked with publishing some of the hAudio draft in my previous music round up. I think it’s getting there.

4. I’ve spend some off-time brainstorming on a new effort myself; ‘embed’. No dedicated wiki page yet as I’m still compiling the initial data to get it rolling. There’s nearly enough to push it though; a few more sites to grab examples from to get people thinking. It’s deriving some concepts from the oEmbed format Pownce supported, allowing sites to describe their ‘embed codes’ for reuse around the web. I want to be able to reuse linked content in an activity stream, and deriving embeds from mark-up rather than writing drivers for every site on the net. It would make reblogging the embedded content more graceful, too. More robust use cases coming soon.

5. Microformats have issues, feature requests, bug reports, tasks to do. At present we track them on the wiki along with the specification documents themselves. Personally I find it a nightmare. Tracking and triaging issues through versioned documents in various structures is harder and less transparent than I’d like, so fixing it would be nice. The wiki update last year has the facility to hook spec ‘issues’ links up to other systems, and I’m spending some time experimenting. Community feedback needed here, plus considerations to be made regarding self-hosting something like Trac or offloading to an external tool. It could happen quite quickly, since I don’t think there are many sane arguments defending the wiki method; it doesn’t scale.

6. Wiki rewrites. I’m good at writing. I’m too verbose for sure, but I communicate well. I’ve taken great pleasure in applying this to more recent microformats output and I like to think I do a pretty good job of improving the experience of interacting with microformats documentation. Many pages on the wiki aren’t as well written. I don’t mean to criticise other authors, I refer more to the way in which over time important pages like the process and how to play page have been edited and added to so many times that at this point, I fear they’ve become impenetrable to a new visitor, and if they can’t follow the rules and I want to see effort go into reworking those pages to be higher quality documents, more approachable and easier to reference when they need to be enforced.

7. Support transformation efforts. In 2008, I’ve noted a couple of repeat proposals and desires for using microformat specifications in other contexts than HTML. Being in HTML is part of what makes something a microformat, so we’ve had instances of proposed forking. Versions of hAudio exist republished for use in RDFa, there’s an entire page on the microformats wiki called jCard — putting hCard into JSON for interchange. Per-specification duplication is, in my view, wrong. Duplicating specifications leads to fragmentation, confusion, incompatibilities. If people have use cases for transforming a microformat into RDF, or JSON, or anything at all, the core spec needs be the same. What we need documented are consistant rules for transforming HTML into any of those other languages. ‘Transforming microformats into JSON’ could be a single wiki reference page for all current and future microformats, explaining how to convert different microformat patterns into JSON. Not a ‘jCard’ and a ‘jCalendar’ and ‘jAtom’, with an ‘rRecipe’ for RDF and xResume for raw XML. Just one set of rules to handle the transformations that are useful. Within that, defining the parsed object structures of the microformats goes most of the way to serialising into another language, and that’s a job for parser authors to settle on the best way to turn microformats into objects consistently.

All of the above is a reasonable ask, I think. It’s ongoing progress in an evolutionary approach in development of standards and infrastructure. My big wish for the year is perhaps a bigger step.

The next level: API Kits

Consider existing services: Google Contacts, Yahoo! Address Book. Standalone data providers, whose APIs offer high level methods to access the contacts held within.

A popular use case for hCard and XFN is contribution to the distributed social ecosystem. Data about people and social relationships is published all across the web, but consuming it is prohibitively hard for most developers.

Whereas someone developing for the YAB or Google data stores can download wrappers around the high-level methods those APIs offer, consuming microformats remains at the parsing level. There’s no Person::getFriends('http://ben-ward.co.uk')-like method returning an array of vcard objects. If we’re serious about evangelising consumption of hcard in social networks. We need high level, task centic toolkits, not just raw parsers.

A higher level means providing solutions to common problems and use-cases, rather than a solution to ‘microformats’. A ‘Distributed Contacts API’ that follows XFN links between hCards, handles crawling pages and/or interaction with the Google Social Graph API. Ultimately, you make one call to a high level function and it just happens. I want to see microformat-based tools that boom!.

I think XFN and hCard offer the two most appealing toolkits: Distributed user profiles (‘Distributed Profile API’) to the profiles information described with hCard, linked with rel='me' and the aforementioned ‘Distributed Contacts API’ for obtaining the profiles of other people you link to as friends.

I’m thinking that methods like these are needed to make it trivial for social applications to start consuming microformats more ambitiously:

Person::getProfile('http://ben-ward.co.uk', callback)

Get all profile info for the person at ben-ward.co.uk, and fire the provided callback function when completed (you need callbacks for all of this since it’s both asynchronous handle and crawling the web is going to take a little time).

Person::getConnections(
    'http://ben-ward.co.uk',
    [ 'friend', 'acquaintance' ],
    callback );

Return the profiles of all the people connected to the person at ben-ward.co.uk connected with XFN ‘friend’ or ‘acquaintance’ relationships.

Methods like these make it simple for developers to start using the huge wealth of published microformatted data to enhance and power their social applications. Right now, getting to those methods is a lot of labour. We need to build it once, and we need to do it in the open. I would love to be in a position this year that we can evangelise microformat consumption with as much strength as we do microformat publishing. OAuth and OpenID has a lot of evangelic traction because libraries exist to implement it in many languages; ‘You should use OAuth, here’s some code you can use!’ is rather more convincing than ‘You should consume microformats! Err…’.

We can’t legitimately push sites to consume hCard with an effort barrier so high. If a stable API kit exists that a developer can just drop in to their codebase — like the wrappers for OAuth — then we can make a strong case to see the open web realise a little more of its potential. I’ve written about the dream of a distributed, microformatted web before at Digital Web. I want to see if become real, rather than just ‘possible’.

You can see this sort of thing in practice already on a tiny but beautiful scale. If you have an OpenID, and an hCard at that same URL, go sign up on User Voice. You’ll auth using OpenID, and when you bounce back to complete your profile, User Voice already knows your name and email address. That information comes not from attribute exchange through OpenID (which the Yahoo OpenID provider doesn’t support), but through reading the hCard from my URL. I wondered for a moment what was going on. And then I just smiled. It’s the future, now. I want to see that user experience available at low cost to every developer.

So, there’s my forward looking. I see the above as pretty concrete ideas. Of course, there’s far too much to lead myself. So, who knows. I hope that others in the community will feel inspired and that we’ll see this kind of work happen. Just as much, I hope to see the visions of others. This community is diverse. I think I’m one of the most passionate about the actual core of the community (perhaps more so than any particular microformat itself), but there wealth of thoughts and ideas amongst all our membership. If you’re one of those, I invite you to write up your vision for the year.

Microformats are a huge deal. Where do we go next? More formats? Reinforcing what we’ve got? Appealing to new groups of publishers and developers that haven’t heard of us yet?

If there’s enough posts along these lines I’ll link them all together on the microformats.org blog.

On paper, it’s been pretty good. I attended South by Southwest Music for the first time, spent most of the year living in East London with a music junkie Last.FM-ite and spending great times socialising with David Emery of Beggars Group, so music exposure may have been greater and more eclectic than any previous year. I come out of it not entirely convinced, and my mostly unordered pick of the records I enjoyed the most almost seem predictable written down. Regardless, onward.

Albums

A brilliant, full album is still my favourite way to consume music. Despite listing more to Last.FM and Hype Machine this year than last, despite iTunes adding a really good ‘Genius’ playlist generator feature and despite dropping portable capacity down to 8GB by trading my iPod for an iPhone, I still adore the experience and coherence of a good album.

Antidotes by Foals is my favourite record of the year. It’s just great. I appreciate some early adopters were a little put off by the absence of Mathletics, and the unexpected introduction of a brass section, but the songcraft just clicks everywhere for me. The tunes are great, the riffs get you moving, the switches in pace and style midway through songs is just perfect. Two Steps, Twice is my standout favourite track. It builds up, slowly, pacing perfect and eventually explodes in a synthed up crescendo of energy and tune. It’s just the best thing I’ve heard all year. That said, the preceding Heavy Water, whilst initially a bit of a weaker song, pulls of a great dance explosion at the end as well. It’s a song that just transforms in ways you don’t expect. Whilst Battles brought math-rock out of the shadows earlier, Oxford’s Foals have made something that’s probably more accessible, but no less classy.

Elsewhere, Fleet Foxes maintained the Americana revival apace, with gorgeous earthy, folky songs. Lightspeed Champion’s ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’ record (with Emmy the Great backing) is full of wonderful folk-pop songs, Cut Copy’s ‘In Ghost Colours’ makes wonderful late night music with its combination of lively dance, atmospheric keyboards and sprinkling of “Oh, it’s a bit like New Order, isn’t it?”; underlining why playing full length records won’t go away. Plus Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip formed Neon Neon, rushed back in time to salvage the electronic bits of the 80’s and won it all with ‘Stainless Style’.

Elbow’s evolution continues to astound. I love this band dearly, every record they’ve ever released has touched me in some way and every one has glorious moments that I’ll go back and play forever. I don’t know if any one song on ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ is better than anything they’ve done previous, but the record as a whole is somehow a more coherent, more complete offering than what came before. It’s inevitably more mature; less of a departure in sound from ‘Leaders of the Free World’ than it could have been, but over a handful of listens, from start to finish it draws you in. Richard Hawley provides vocals on ‘The Fix’, and dominates the song. It’s a wonderful stand out moment, though you wonder if it displaces Guy Garvey’s own distinctive vocal too much. Until it rolls into ’Some Riot’, a piece of music of beauty and delicacy and suddenly Garvey’s voice is in its element and you… just… float. Perhaps ‘Some Riot’ is the one song that’s better than anything else they’ve done.

I still regret not saying ‘Hello’ to Guy at London Euston railway station a few years ago, though I still don’t know what I’d say to him now. After my drunken blathering to Moby at SXSW, maybe it’s best I stay away from respectable musicians.

Finally, my dabbling in the physical world of vinyl is growing. I bought a gorgeous Pro-Ject Debut III (in red). A beautifully squared off slap of wood, with minimal controls and, as best I can tell, great sound. I don’t care how near the snob/hipster line I stray, the warm, full sound is awesome and appreciable even on my aged student hi-fi separates. On that, I must mention something completely out of time; The Beta Band. Their first, self titled album which for some reason I own only on vinyl. It’s just great. It’s exactly where pop music rightfully ends up in the late 1990s; assuming the same progression and daring evolution of the preceding forty years. They were unique, The Beta Band, and they are missed.

Songs

Maybe it’s because I pour all my energy into album reviews, but when I get down to individual songs I feel more inclined toward spewing out a quickfire list than anything more substantial. I can’t find much fault with that, so, the songs that made me happy in 2008:

‘The Hill, The View, and the Lights’ by Cajun Dance Party, ‘Two Steps, Twice’ by Foals, ‘Midnight Surprise’ and ‘Dry Lips’ by Lightspeed Champion, ‘Battle Royale’ by Does It Offend You, Yeah?, ‘Your Protector’ by Fleet Foxes, ‘Ghosts’ by Ladytron, ‘Belfast’ by Neon Neon, ‘Lights Out For Darker Skies’ by British Sea Power, ‘Kriss Kross’ by Guillemots from their otherwise disappointing ‘Red’ album, ‘Salute Your Solution’ from Raconteurs ‘Consolers of the Lonely’, ‘Hot Cakes’ by El Ten Eleven — and his cover of ‘Paranoid Android’ is stellar too.

Special mentions go to ‘Talking Backwards’ by Fanfarlo, a band I desperately need to acquire more music of. ‘Talking Backwards’ is one of my favourite pop songs of the whole year. And whilst most of the songs here are linked to Last.FM in some way, you should absolutely follow this one and play the whole song. It’s sublime.

And then, there’s Florence and the Machine.

No album, unsigned until rather recently. I am somewhat obsessed with Florence Welch. But I’m shameless about it. Her two 7” singles this year — ‘Kiss with a Fist’ and ‘Dog Days Are Over’ have just been sublime. Pop music with great tunes, great refrain, darkly humorous lyrics. I could ask nothing more than to have it performed live in my living room. Unless that’s getting creepy, in which case I’ll reluctantly step away. Her performance at SXSW was awesome and had me following her powerful, bluesy voice ever since. Er, more gushing about her follows below. Again with the emphasis on listening to these. Or show up at a party in my apartment and I’ll inevitably play them to you ad nauseam.

For everything else this year, I’ll lazily be referring you to my Last.FM loved tracks and Hype Machine obsessions lists.

Live

Live music was quite special this year. I attended South by Southwest in March, staying on past the usual interactive geek-up and through a gruelling second week of intense music. It was an awesome exercise in discovering bands I’d only heard the name of at that point — Lightspeed Champion, MGMT, Los Campesinos! and so forth. The only accidental discovery was Florence and the Machine, who was stunningly good and did quite curious things to my heart rate with her voice alone.

Later came The Great Escape in Brighton, which bills itself as a British version of SXSW, but by offering rather fewer shows per night, they don’t handle the quantity of attendees so well. There’s hope if they can scale up venues faster than they scale attendees. Saw some good shows, although Lightspeed Champion almost undid all the good from SXSW in one dreadful performance.

The Ting Tings were actually a lot of fun live at SXSW (and again at The Great Escape), but the album kinda slumped off my radar after a few weeks. In still can’t quite believe that after recording the weak, wheezing falsetto on title track ‘We Started Nothing’ someone was actually paid to say ‘Yeah, that’s great!’. I think my subsequent disenchantment was what David intended to refer to as inevitable… although all I heard was him hurling expletives at me for listening to Ting Tings in the first place. I’m sure I’ve got his sentiment nailed down now, though.

I did a good number of shows at Somerset House again. It’s a frankly very expensive way to see less shows than a music festival, but the venue is magnificent illuminated and it was right near the Yahoo! office.

It would be remiss not to mention the biggest event of my live music year. I managed to clock up seeing Radiohead three times; two nights in London’s Victoria Park (all of five minutes walk from my then home), and once more in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I missed out on the surprise show at Rough Trade on Brick Lane; oh well. The second night in London stands out as my favourite, but with a repertoire as good as theirs is difficult to fault on any night. The variation night to night keeps it fresh and the experience as the sun sets is just stellar. I’m still to experience anything as mind blowing as tens of thousands of people singing the coda to Karma Police. For a minute there we lost ourselves.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve spent most of the year since South by Southwest absolutely fixated by Florence Welch to a degree bordering on social unacceptability. Even without my mild obsession, Florence and the Machine’s records are catchy, her voice is magnificent, her lyrics darkly comic and together with songs of pure pop brilliance, she offers something beyond any of the more famous London soloists. Like Steve Lamaq, I really can’t figure out what to expect nor what I want from 2009 in terms of broader trends and scenes, but an album from Florence is on the cards, so that’s one thing at least.

I’m looking forward to see what San Francisco offers up in 2009.

OpenID and OAuth are the open, standards based and interoperable editions of this technology, but Yahoo’s deprecated BBAuth and FlickrAuth and others all came before. Also at the tail-end of last year came Facebook Connect, a system whereby websites can piggyback on Facebook profiles for building applications.

For example, take Fire Eagle. It’s a service that stores your location on your behalf, for use by other applications on the web. It uses OAuth to control access to that location; no application can see your location by default. When you visit a site needing your location, it asks Fire Eagle for that information.

Instead providing your Yahoo! username and password to this third party site (which would grant access to your entire Yahoo! account), you are taken to a special page on the Fire Eagle site, click a button to grant specific location permission and then jump back to the original site, which now holds a token to access to your location.

This process means that the site you shared your location with can’t access anything apart from your location (it can’t log into your Yahoo! IM account, for example, or send emails through Yahoo mail). Furthermore, you can log in to Fire Eagle and remove that application any time; you don’t need to change your password to do so.

It’s the future, it’s user empowering, and it’s going to be great. Eventually.

The user experience of this OAuth process — and OpenID alike — has been criticised a bit. Users don’t expect to be moved between different websites, but they are familiar with entering their passwords all over the place. The short ranty version of this article would go like this: If you stop whining and just get on with implementing the OAuth flow, users will get used to it and will be just fine. It’s is usable as-is, so shut up already. But this is the long, constructive version, so:

The user experience of OAuth and OpenID is immature, and can still be massively improved and smoothed out with concerted design effort.

Which brings me to Facebook Connect. Connect is a product as well as a proprietary technology. It’s a packaged and complete offering from Facebook, and as such, comes with a far more complete and polished user experience than the technology-focused, open standards have so far achieved. Polished and mind bogglingly stupid, in places, but, y’know.

Facebook Connect, whilst proprietary and product-specific and therefore irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, has UX that can be applied to OAuth and OpenID flows. If service providers support this, I think user experience gets much better, quickly.

How does Facebook Connect work?

The most common use case for Facebook Connect appears to be commenting on blogs, such as on Gawker sites. Rather than enter your details standalone, or uniquely register with a site, you log into Facebook, and Gawker uses those details instead.

So, you click the shiny ‘Facebook Connect’ button in the comments form, and an overlay appears:

This is the crux of the learning for OAuth. Rather than redirect to Facebook, this granting of permission happens right in the page in an embedded control.

It’s not quite as simple as this, mind. It’s ok that this action occurs in an overlay only because the user is already logged in to Facebook. No exchange of credentials takes place: The overlay is an iframe serving a page from Facebook’s server, so my current login cookie is used and there’s no need for Facebook to ask for my password. A malicious site would gain nothing by spoofing this dialog.

Since writing this article, Facebook have improved the behaviour of Connect. Now, if you are signed in you see an overlay as before, but if not signed in Connect opens a new window, where all usual browser functionality is available. This a huge improvement and fixes the complaints that follow.

Unfortunately, Facebook Connect then screws up. The whole point of delegated auth is that we stop users entering their passwords into third party sites. It has to stop. That means both actually entering their details into third parties, but also interface that gives the impression of giving your password to a third party. When you are not currently logged into Facebook, you instead see this dialog:

Millions of Facebook users, openly encouraged to enter their password into any site that asks. This is wrong. If the user is not already logged into the service, you should be redirected in a more traditional bounce between pages. That way browser-level phishing tools kick in, the URL in the address bar can be manually inspected by the user and, critically, the user is conscious of logging into a different service.

Facebook ranting aside, the first half of their Connect overlay UI would be very useful to enhance the user experience of OAuth and OpenID.

Here’s a hypothetical Fire Eagle app built into Last.FM.

In the current implementation of OAuth, clicking ‘Get Fire Eagle Location’ would redirect you to the Fire Eagle website, and then you’d redirect back again after clicking ‘Confirm’.

Instead, OAuth apps should do this by default:

No redirect, lighter weight UI and more responsive feedback. This, I think, is something that OAuth APIs should support out of box along with their other language wrappers; provide drop-in support.

Now, this behaviour applies for logged in users only. If you’re not logged in to Fire Eagle for any reason, you should still be moved to the separate site as before. We need to stay strict on keeping users spatially aware of where they are entering their passwords, otherwise the whole effort is undermined.

Overlaid OpenID

With one example down, here’s a mock of how Open ID could benefit from the same integrated flow, this time working with Dopplr, since they already support Open ID:

If not logged in to Yahoo, you get a prompt and just as before, are guided to step through the regular, separate-site process to sign in:

Clicking ‘Sign in to Yahoo!’ would take the user to Yahoo’s standalone page.

How to make this happen?

For this to happen, services need to provide support for it; it can’t be done just at the client side. The dialog-sized interfaces for authorising applications or logging into sites need to provided, and they need to support the ‘break out to enter passwords’ flow. But, sites like Fire Eagle already provide a mobile-scale version of the auth page, so further variants are not a major hindrance.

It also needs a JavaScript component to handle the UI side. With a bit of luck, this only needs to be done once and shared between projects.

The core technology behind OAuth and OpenID is pretty robust. Both have major adopters like Yahoo and Google. OpenID has a bit of a bit of a way to go before users need it, perhaps, but regardless, it’s well into the same phase where user experience needs to be a concerted effort, and the status quo needs to be challenged.

Everything in this post is just a small step from what we already have, it’s just smoothing out the edges. Maybe that’s enough, but I suspect there’s a long way to go and a wealth of other ideas out there.

A year ago, I sat in my flat in London, somewhat settled, surrounded by wonderful friends. Sometime over the past twenty-four hours I had got monumentally drunk at Barden’s Boudoir and dancedflailed wildly happily to Soulwax remixes of Klaxons. At some point I would be handed a half-full bottle of vodka by a barman and pour drinks for twenty people in my immediate vicinity and be cheered on like I’d brought home the World Cup.

Life was, mostly, peachy.

Also around that time I had an intriguing conversation across the Atlantic. ‘Have you ever considered working in the States?’ is the executive summary. ‘Nope… but tell me more’ is my abridge response.

It’s difficult to write a retrospective of 2008 because although I didn’t move to the US until August, doing so eclipsed everything else that happened this year. In scale and impact, I mean, not necessarily in importance.

2008 is the year I moved to America. Got offered the chance, knew I couldn’t refuse, took a deep breath, took a lot of risks, and did it.

Moving, especially when it’s at least partially spontaneous, is a rush. So much happens at once that I lost track. So many decisions to make, so many major jobs to do one after another without a break. A new job with new people, new friends to be made.

In a great many ways, I did what I always do, which is to land on my feet and do really well for myself. I don’t like to assume that’s how things will always work out, but it’s become such a recurrence that I should start documenting it more scientifically. That said, at the pace of change, and under the huge rush of emotions and disorientation that comes with moving, I did plenty of things wrong too. My Christmas break came after 139 days in America, and actually, to fly home to England and take stock is exactly what I needed.

The out of control rush had to end, the Yahoo layoffs experience and resultant rush to find new employment did nothing to lower my pulse and so the time away came as a really welcome break.

I’ve come out of it calmer and more stable. I fly back to the US in a few hours, and I think I’m in a good state of mind for starting a new job, and tying up the last few loose ends of 2008.

I ordinarily dismiss the idea of new years resolutions, but the way my experiences have fallen this year I start 2009 feeling unusually resolute.

Some things are both predictable and rather cliché, but also very necessary. Having an operation for appendicitis in April got my weight down to where it should be (note: not a recommendation form of weight loss, plus you can only do it once). Moving to the States has seen me put it all back on, and exercise less. That has to change, else I’ll be a grotesque lardbucket by the time I write the 2009 review.

Elsewhere, the new job is going to let me keep a better work-life balance, since I’ll be commuting from Sunnyvale daily. As such, I want to see my personal projects go live. I have lots to do at microformats.org, I have various wiki-related pieces of work in progress and needing to go live, as well as 33FortyFive, which I’ve been working the concept for for ages now.

I need to track my life better. This year has shown how one really big event can throw off my knowledge of the rest of the year. So starting January first, I’m keeping a retrospective for all my social appointments, so I get a better overview of where my time goes. Maybe I’ll make that public, or anonymized somehow, if it proves interesting.

There’s all manner of small things, and longer term, niggling tasks that I have to get done. Really, it all falls under a renewed determination I’m feeling. It all starts when I land in SFO on Saturday evening.

Let’s see how this works out…

Brickhouse was a wonderful thing, and I fear its brilliance and inner creativity was not understand as it should have been. Unfortunately, whatever the cause of judgement, on December 10th Yahoo elected to close our group and approach the challenges of building new products in different ways.

It’s was crushing for those of us working there on a number of levels. We loved our co-workers, we loved our product (Fire Eagle) and we loved the premise of Brickhouse; an inspiring work environment of ideas and creativity. For the preceding three weeks I’d worked late into the night so that on Tuesday we could launch Friends on Fire. I’m glad to have got it out, rather than it be discarded on an SVN server somewhere.

For me, mourning the intellectual loss of a dream job wasn’t really a priority. My working in the US was entirely tied to working at Yahoo. For me, unemployment would mean prompt deportation, and moving to a new company required a willingness to sponsor a new visa, and would still leave my location and life in limbo for most of 2009.

The reaction from outside is difficult or me describe. Genuinely, a slack jawed gasp provides as good a summary as any. I witnessed colleagues across the world band together to promote my name and those of my friends also departing the Brickhouse. The quantity of direct contact I received through Twitter and email was astounding. The power of the meritorious society that has developed around the web is huge. People trust one another’s recommendations because unlike industries of old, there is no old boys network here. The great people we associate with are people we thrive from. We support and work off one another not because we’re friends, but because we do better in proximately to those who are also talented.

I was taken aback by the response and far from sulk in my situation, I’ve spend the last ten days following up. I think I replied to everyone, but given how bloated my inbox was after just a few hours, I think I should say ‘sorry’ to anyone who hasn’t heard back from me, but mostly ‘*thank you*’. Thank you for your support through this. Whether who knew me and knew my skills, or just wanted to talk with me to see if something could be worked out, every query and message has helped sustain me through this.

The Lay Off

Being laid off in America is strange on all manner of levels. It’s just like in films. You get told what’s happening, and handed a box. You clear your desk then and there, hand over your computer and security pass. Security guards lurk around at the door, purportedly to protect the ones who still have jobs from being attacked by the vengeful disgruntled unemployed. It’s a harsh, blunt, heartless process. It’s offensive on so many levels, disrespectful to you as a person, disrespectful of the work you care about and that, despite the situation, you might care to have properly passed on to a co-worker. Instead, projects are dropped where they stand, no knowledge transfer takes place, weeks maybe months of work is just discarded.

Apparently it’s normal like this in the US. In England you get given an end date, you work up until it, you pass on your work to someone else. You show some respect to your coworkers. Here that doesn’t exist even if you want it to.

I’ve only lost a job once before. Working at Yobject ended suddenly when their finances ran out. I didn’t get paid on time, and I only found out when my debit card started to be rejected… whilst I was on holiday at SXSW. Being strategically laid off is rather different.

Needless to say, no-one from Brickhouse started any fights with security. Instead we went to Hotel Utah at 4th & Brannan in San Francisco. Owen Thomas of Valleywag lied that he phoned in to buy everyone shots. He actually purchased six. I guess times are hard in the gutter too. The wonderful Hotel Utah barstaff donated around ten more to make up the difference. The staff are wonderful at Hotel Utah. When you’re there, ask them to add bacon to their (magnificent) Mac & Cheese, it’s stella.

Warming

Saturday 13th, three days after being laid off, was my housewarming in San Francisco. A more bittersweet timing you could not have engineered. Sitting in a home I’ve grown very fond of, surrounded by the furniture I picked out for myself and bought, pondering whether I’d still be living here in two months time, or whether it would all have been offloaded in my enforced absence.

I lamented over this briefly, and then countered by getting drunk and playing Rock Band all night. I’m enjoying throwing parties. The support of so many wonderful friends in a time of stress cannot be understated.

No stopping

To stay in the country I needed to put aside the bitter and upset emotions induced by Wednesday and push for a new role at Yahoo. Every contact I have there, and plenty more I made in the process, was contacted in the hope they find an open position within the next few weeks. Get a new role, the visa stays valid and (in some words) ‘it’s as if I were never laid off at all’.

I spent my remaining pre-Christmas days in San Francisco keeping up in a scrum of simultaneous conversation with every company who would listen who might sponsor a visa, and harranging everyone I know still inside Yahoo. Getting back into Yahoo! is the option that provides me stability. No leaving the country for any length of time, continuity of home, relationships and friendships. Longer term I can settle and get myself into a less precarious position, but the priority at every step in this horrific process is do not ruin my life.

A few people suggested to me that returning to Yahoo was non-obvious. I concede that Yahoo is a little airborne at present (remember, we don’t even have a full-time CEO), and post-layoffs and post–Brickhouse-closure we are still waiting to see a lot of the 2009 plan revealed. Fact is, I make a distinction between the company and the team. There’s nothing unreasonable in saying that every single engineer at Yahoo is expecting a lot from the Yahoo board over the next six months, to put itself on the straight and narrow again and offer a vision. But even whilst pending that progress, the teams within these walls make up of some of the most talented engineers I know and if I could get the opportunity to work with them again it would be a great thing, no matter what the circumstances.

With some delight, I can report that I did get that opportunity.

Some time in the new year I’ll be switching over into the Yahoo Developer Network, and hopefully doing awesome things to help people inside and outside Yahoo work with new platforms like YAP YQL and and so forth. I’ve been pretty passionate about development community infrastructure since I started working with microformats.org, so it’s great have that overlap with my day job more.

It will be a shame to lose working from San Francisco all the time, but I’ll adapt to the Sunnyvale commute soon enough.

To everyone who helped me out, sent me offers, enquiries and advice over the past two weeks: Thank you.

I studied the politics of the United States back in 2000–2001 for an A-Level course. It was just a twelve month study, but it provided an insight into the comparison with the politics back home in the UK. In the US, the cultural aversion to third parties and absolutes of a two party system make for quite blunt presentation. The impression painted is of a severely divided nation.

Red republicans vs. blue democrats. Entire states — entire countries by European scales — grouped into supporting one single party or candidate.

It’s a side affect of the allocation of electoral college votes; a system whereby the citizens of each state vote for the president, and the winning candidate in each state receives a number of votes based on population. It’s biased toward smaller states to try and protect them from being trampled by the larger ones. It deliberately distorts the popular vote to maintain a stronger union.

So, for example, California has 55 electoral college votes, Texas 34, but comparatively tiny states like North Dakota still get 3.

The electoral college itself is not a huge problem. The problem is with presentation. Consider this electoral map, which you can find as part of MSNBC’s excellent Election Dashboard.

The political leaning of each state is represented in terms of absolute victory. Not in terms of margin of victory. Solid blocks of colour show Democrat coasts, and red Republican centre. It shows a nation torn apart. It shows divide.

Maps like this are terrifying. They represents an unreconcilable division of political parties who are, frankly, not ideologically far apart. They encourage casual observer to write off the detailed viewpoints of ‘blue states’ or ‘red states’, simply because they don’t affect the vote.

Really, these maps are a gross misrepresentation of the viewpoints of Americans. At an emotionally heated election time, when Republican political rallies become tinged by violence toward their countrymen, it strikes me that perhaps the incessant reinforcement of this map undermines the foundations of the American nationality, not just statistics.

To get to my point. These maps exist to represent the allocation of electoral college votes. Electoral votes are allocated all or nothing — except for Maine and Nebraska, which uses a more proportionally representative Congressional District method. In response to the all-or-nothing allocation, solid blocks of blue represent safe Democrat seats, solid blocks of red safe Republican seats. It implies solid majority support, when really ‘safety’ only means a majority of at least 10 points.

Take Maine. The magnificent FiveThirtyEight gives a hugely comprehensive breakdown of polling. Maine is a ‘safe’ Democrat state. But really, it’s just a 55 to 43 split in favour of Barack Obama. And that’s with a ±5% margin of error.

Summarising today’s FiveThirtyEight projections, the divide between Democrat and Republican voters are far less pronounced that the maps across the internet and television make out.

FiveThirtyEight’s table is an image, bizarrely, so I’ve only copied out some of the stats. Hopefully enough to illustrate my point.

Presidential vote projections by State

State	Dem	Rep	Margin	Resprentation
AK	41.7	57.1	15.4	Safe GOP
AL	38.5	60.3	21.7	Safe GOP
AR	45.5	52.9	7.4	Likely GOP
AZ	43.1	55.4	12.3	Safe GOP
CA	57.5	40.6	17	Safe DEM
CO	52.1	46.5	5.5	Likely DEM
CT	57.5	40.3	17.2	Safe DEM
DE	58.7	40	18.7	Safe DEM
FL	50.7	48.0	2.6	Leaning Dem
GA	46.3	52.4	6.1	Likely GOP
HI	64.8	34	30.7	Safe DEM
IA	55.6	42.7	12.9	Safe Dem
ID	36.8	62	25.2	Safe GOP
IL	58.7	39.6	19	Safe DEM
IN	48.2	49.8	1.6	Lean GOP

The impression that the coasts are so dominated by democrats or that the centre states are dominated by republicans is false. A 30 percent minority is far too large to be dismissed, and yet that is what the disproportional maps show.

I’d like to redraw that map in different ways. Redraw colour intensity by actually percentages, rather than safety. Redraw each state showing both red and blue. I think it would provide a reassuring view of America. One of integrated political, rather than division. The perception of division appears widespread, and it is a falsehood.

At the core of this? Huge numbers of American voters are disregarded both by the electoral system and the media presentation of the election.

As a liberal minded type, is Texas write off of right-wing politics? No. In fact, 42% of the biggest red blog on the map poll for Democrats, and yet the small majority makes a massive impression on the perception of America’s make-up. The reverse is true in Calfornia. That huge hunk of blue that suggests the entire West Coats is a liberal haven? Also 40% Republican. Even Alaska, a state dismissed as neo-conservative due to its Sarah Palin connection in fact polls 41% Democrat. Those people are lost in these maps.

This is not really about whether the electoral system is fair, it’s the negative social effect of representing it this way. American politics can do without any more negative social effects.

The previous entry on microblogging was the start of a realisation. Realising that Pownce is useful in its capacity as a microblogging platform rather than as an alternative to Twitter, I think that my personal publishing breaks down cleanly into tiers, based on the depth of the content. And a wiki is perhaps the most natural part of that as anything.

Blogging, as in a site like this, is really only well suited to a certain style of publishing. I want to publish content of a consistent style on this blog. I want there to be a certain amount of depth to each entry, and I don’t want some detailed attempt all about the philosophy of personal publishing to be punctuated by a single line piece stating that ‘I could really murder a chip butty right now’.

The way I see this breaking down, and this is starting to feel quite natural, is as follows:

• Pownce is for short things. Thoughts, spontaneous musings, links that you think are remarkable (which contrasts with Delicious, which is a store of links I think are useful in some way). It suits short, sharp content. No room for depth. That’s microblogging.
• This blog contains longer, more considered content. I feel reasonably sure that the things I write here are somehow valuable, either as information or as an expression of my self. They have some depth. Comments are on. I should track responses on other blogs, too. Whilst communicating via separate blogs is a lamentably lost ideal of the original, pre-comments design of blogging, it’s a concept I like. In aiming to write content of substance, I’d want to support it.

The critical thing with a blog though, and something that should be embraced, is time sensitivity. What I write here is timestamped and could, upon further reflection in a month or a year prove to be dismissible rambling bullshit. But the timestamp validates that. The moment you read this you know that it’s old and that gives you the context to consume it. You can write safe in the knowledge that time will let your obsolete content fade away. Timeless, accidental masterpieces will look after themselves.

Which leads to wikis. A wiki will contain detailed content. Thoughts, projects, entire subjects documented through the eyes of an author. Wikis have long been complemented for being very close to the original ideals of the read/write web that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned (back before no-one had bothered to implemented the necessary HTTP verbs to do it). It’s back to a world of writing standalone pages. And in standalone, I mean to imply timeless. So, my ‘about me’ page isn’t a blog entry, it’s a page, and wiki is a superior publishing medium to maintain that kind of content. Similarly, documenting my ‘thoughts on personal publishing’, and my ‘current publishing practices’ is a standalone, timeless (and constantly updated) piece of information. Here I blog about how I publish, or rather, how I’m considering doing it. It’s driven by a desire for discussion. However, to publish my current publishing behaviour, a wiki is a superior platform. That one URL (let’s say, perhaps, http://ben-ward.co.uk/content/Publishing) will always represent current information and is far preferable over regular blog entries every time I change something. ‘Publishing Patterns, August 2008’, ‘Publishing Patterns, November 2008’… a blog is less suitable for versioned content.

So, Twitter is a slight oddball

I regard it as publishing ‘fragments’ of my day. By my reckoning it fits into the tier below (smaller than) ‘microblogging’. But it grew out from encouraging people to just publish their status and into its own social network. So as well as containing the little snippets of my day, it also contains pieces of social interaction. Twitter is great, but it’s a less pure publishing platform.

Combination. The lifestream.

The thing about blogging — an issue that produced some background resistance in me to the personal wiki concept — is that whilst you can better maintain content, you’re unable to push it to people. A blog has a feed and people consume that feed and therefore people read what you have to say. Sound vain? Get over that and accept that in some capacity we all want people to read what we write and we don’t want our output buried somewhere it’ll never be found.

If I were to produce a nicely combined life stream (which I will), Pownce, Twitter and the blog are chronological and so slot in neatly. Twitter gets filtered to avoid publishing those ‘social interaction’ posts, but otherwise fits in. But since wiki content is not time sensitive, it is not the content itself but the edits of that content which should be streamed. That in itself is a bit problematic. New pages are probably noteworthy, major edits are probably noteworthy; minor edits not so much.

The scenario I’m trying to support is this: Rather than someone come to this site and subscribe to just the blog feed, they would subscribe to the whole lifestream. But, the lifestream would be built such that the content is relevant enough they don’t get irritated by its content. Not an easy balance. Configuration seems like a grossly over-complex solution, but perhaps offering two predefined options would be manageable; substantial content containing blog entries, major wiki edits, and longer Pownce posts could be available separately from the whole life stream.

I suppose I should build it.

The curious thing about this is that really, tabs suck. They always existed as a simple hack around the operating system’s (Windows) inability to handle many windows together. The taskbar got full too easily, and when 75% of the items were browser windows, it all became unmanageable. As a result, tabs went into every browser on every platform, effectively providing a second, browser-context-specific taskbar.

The problem now (and likely then as well) is that the idea of one single ‘browser context’ is bogus. Browsers are now used for such a variety of tasks and applications that it makes less sense to keep, for example, Gmail and Google Calendar in the same context as a set of blogs you might be reading. Your cycle of looking at those pages is different. Mail more regularly than Calendar, and the blogs might just be a reading list to refer to later. Whilst browsers were very quick to add tabs as a feature, non of them have worked them into the idea of working contexts. New items always open in your last used window. Even if you manually break Gmail out into its own window, the moment you open a link you’re putting a reading list of pages into your email context. Tabs are implemented in a physical, window based manner, rather than in a workflow based manner.

On Mac OSX specifically, there’s an addition problem (actually, physical). The otherwise quite-useful Exposé function doesn’t work with tabs in any application. So whilst in Pages, Fireworks, Preview and so on I could hit F10 and see all my documents together, the tabbed browser hides all the content away behind tabs.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to a point. I’ve turned off tabbed browsing. Switched back to the old way of having each document or application in a separate window. Switching between then with Cmd+` rather than Cmd+Shift+], gaining the ability to see them visually with a swift tap of F10, and losing the recurring bug of thinking I’m finished with all the documents in one manually created context window, only to find the music stops when I accidentally close Last.FM.

To defy my muscle memory for hitting Cmd+T, I’ve used Mac OSX’s excellent Keyboard preferences to override ‘New Window’ to Cmd+T, and New Tab to Cmd+Option+T.

It’s just an experiment. Sometimes you do want tabs to keep things under control, for example working through a feed reader, opening links for reference later creates a single ‘reading list’ task, and you wouldn’t want dozens of those individual pages cluttering up the rest of the desktop. There will always be exceptions. But since the browser software has failed to handle work contexts properly, I think reversing the default behaviour is the way to go.

Initial reactions are that this is easier to manage, results in less accidents and no accidents in losing windows (Safari has a ‘Reopen last closed window’ option, but is less graceful with tabs).

Note, this problem with tabs is just a result of needing to break web applications and documents out of the browser context. Efforts like Fluid (a WebKit based browser that creates standalone executables for specific websites) also help break out these contexts for apps you use regularly, but is less suitable for infrequent or new apps. Also, this is not to say that all tabs are broken. Tabs in IM apps like Adium still work me, because the amount of content open at one time is fairly small, and managing two work contexts (‘Work Conversations’ and ‘Personal Conversations’) within a single window interface is trivial. The web browser falls down because the amount of content and the number of contexts now exceeds what I can manage.

We could build better browsers, but it strikes me that the better first action is to step back and stop bypassing the capabilities of the host operating system.

28 days ago was my first night in this temporary apartment. A neutral but very pleasant place to the south of North Beach with a quite stunning view of the bay, Alcatraz, and that Mediterranean looking tower that I forever forget the name of. Tonight is my last night here, tomorrow I shift over to my permanent new digs in the awesome (and very sunny) Mission district. It’s going to be a bit odd, what with having no furniture, but I’m really pleased with the location and the relief of having somewhere that I really like outweighs it all.

Finding somewhere, and ordering the first wave of furniture has helped me focus on the rest of life a bit too. Everything went a bit wild when I landed. I ended up discarding the remaining blog drafts from my flight. They weren’t as complete as the others and I couldn’t make anything coherent from them. And then an iPhone upgrade accidentally wiped them out, just to be sure.

At least one of those concerned the (ever lovely) Dot, who has moved in the opposite direction around the world, imposing a 9 hour time difference on us. Would we actually stay in touch? Would the time shift be surmountable? These and other generic ponderings have actually shaken out well. At this point we’ve established a pretty regular Skype routine going and I have to arrange shipment of a plushy companion cube one third the way around the globe.

The biological family have got the hang of Skype too, which is keeping me in the loop much more than I’d expected.

I’m staring at a strange week of frantic furniture acquisition (I’m in the market for a dining table and chairs, if you’re interested), since the new apartment is totally empty. I’ll be sleeping on a mattress for a bit, since the bed frame won’t arrive instantly either. I intend to slum it, since I think living in the apartment will act as motivation to furnish it properly, whereas running off to a spare room elsewhere will likely prolong the whole process.

I reserve the right to reverse that decision when it affects my sleep.

Now that I’ve got some grasp of how long it takes for furniture to get delivered, I reckon we’re on for a housewarming in early October.

That is not to say I don’t think of things, though, and in the interests of actually exposing them, I’m going to make better effort to post them in an oh-so-trend-although-actually-it’s-been-trendy-for-ages-now-I’m-just-late-to-the-party microblogging fashion. Two options are apparent. Tumblr, which I’ve previously only used for secret emo outpouring during a frankly unpleasant time in my life, or Pownce, which I’ve never quite nailed down the niche for. Tumblr is pretty, and flexible and maps to my own domain, so I’m trying that first: snippets.ben-ward.co.uk is alive (give or take a few hours for DNS propagation).

Within a few minutes of setting it up though, I’m immediately wondering if Pownce, with its desktop and iPhone apps, support for images and Fire Eagle integration might be a better choice. I might switch over quite quickly.

I’m looking out the window at Oregan, flying over the flats between Mount Rainier and the Blue Mountains. Below me are circular fields—surely an inefficient use of farmland, but since there’s no shortage of land in this gigantic country, I guess the ease of ploughing, sowing and harvesting in a big spiral is appealing. We’re about 570 miles from San Francisco. (I’ve stopped watching films and have the flight info screen scrolling by instead—it took ages to write this paragraph as I waited for each map view to cone around twice for spelling confirmation.)

I recall Tom warning me about these feelings. Something to the effect of having a good chunk of time where you feel like you’re making a terrible mistake.

Just a semi-circular field this time. Pretty sure that’s not as clever.

I wish I’d remembered him saying that earlier, when I was feeling it.

Anyway, I know this is going to be awesome. Give it a week to sort out the remaining beurocratic nonsense and get my Twitter friends list up to scratch and it’ll be easy. Mum will figure out Skype, Dad won’t but will manage to obnoxiously act out in the background whilst Mum’s using it; communication in general won’t be much harder than at home.

The idea that I live here is a bit unreal, though. In fact, that’s only just hinting at sinking in now. It just feels like I’m coming for a visit. I guess I’ll realise that I haven’t returned home at some point.

Live blogging on the plane is very theraputic. Whilst being critical of and frustrated by Wordpress’ internals is all too easy, the iPhone app is simply outstanding. As a publishing platform, very excellent.

Less than an hour to go. Getting excited now.

The effort of making this move, from London to San Francisco, is consuming. Especially this week as everything moves so fast, forms to be filled, a tenancy signed, a one-way flight booked. You don’t get much insight into how other people feel about your departure as you’d like. No matter how temporarily, they’re sad, upset and down. And it only comes out; it only connects, when you actually say goodbye.

It hits you so hard. The coming together of the cold, hectic process of organising a life, and the raw love and emotions of the life you actually live in.

3 hours into the flight we’re over Greenland. Snow covered and rocky, yet surprisingly flat. The total desolation of the place is making me desperately aware of how far away I’m going to be, and how much I’m going to miss my family.

I know it’s going to be fine. I know I’m going to have an amazing time in San Francisco. But I’m back in reality, and I know there are things that will be really difficult, too.