What are you coding? Let us know, copy paste a snippet to Pastie. Pastie is a service for anyone to communicate through the exchange of quick short code snippets. It is a type of Twitter for code. In fact Pastie is more loosely connected to the “rest of the world” than Twitter. There is no user system but a simple API. Besides manual pasting you can also paste from your console, from your text editor, or from an IRC channel, Pastie is close to where you work.

Screenshot from a code snippet on Pastie.

Pastie displays the snippets color coded and well indented, must haves for reading any type of code. It currently supports 14 programming languages including Shell Script, Ruby, Java, C++, SQL, and CSS.

Every snippet has a unique URL, so you can reference them elsewhere. It is generally used in the developer forums. Rather than pasting the code in the forum people just give a link to the beautifully displayed snippet on Pastie.

The simple Pastie API enables developing interesting new applications. There are already remote interfaces that enable using Pastie from TextMate, Vim, Shell console, and Ruby console. Using the API is quite easy, all you do is connect via HTTP and send the code snippet and the language type. I think Pastie could play nicely with any other web application. I can think of using Pastie as part of a social networking application for example. That would enable sharing “my code snippets” with friends and see their snippet stream in my large-scale conversations. Just like video or photo stream, code snippets from friends can be fed in to our fat RSS readers. That would make programming more fun, and social?

Pastie is created by Josh Goebel, one of the contributors to the Ruby on Rails project and co-author of the popular Ruby on Rails forum application Beast.

I’d like to mention another fantastic pasting system Paste (currently offline), an artwork from Martin Wattenberg and his collaborator Marek Walczak. You paste whatever is in your clipboard, something that’s on your mind or just a distraction. Paste combines these pastes into a single text stream, you appreciate the minutia of collective consciousness.

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Today the YouTube Platform launched in Silicon Valley. The new YouTube API allows people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other websites. That is you can create a web service that has a video sharing feature but the videos are hosted on the YouTube servers. Great! We all want one! Apparently YouTube Partners are already on the bandwagon creating “cool YouTube applications“. The Partner program is US, CA, UK only.

You provide the video, YouTube hosts it, and in turn gets all the ad revenue. As I read from the TechCrunch YouTube Platform post YouTube product manager Jim Patterson confirms that there is no revenue-sharing built into the API. He says:

It is a YouTube-branded experience. It is free. The price you pay for using it is you must participate in the YouTube community.

We heard these before. Lets look at the contract, the immaterial contract between a regular user and YouTube, the immaterial contract written and signed only by YouTube. There are 3 monetization ways for YouTube:

1. In-video ads displayed in my own video at my own site
2. In-video ads displayed in my own video at youtube.com
3. In-video ads displayed in my own video that is embedded elsewhere on the web

whereas only 1 monetization way for a regular user:

1. Ads in video pages displayed at my own site

So the new deal is clear: 1 + 1 + n is not equal to 1 + some visibility.

With the new API YouTube massively extends its advertising real-estate, that is every person or web service who hosts videos on YouTube. It must be a clever move in the business literature, but it just increases the value imbalance between the user’s labor and the service’s offer.

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Jonah Brucker-Cohen just released a new art project: “Google Alert Loop“. It uses Google’s “Blogger” software and “Google Alerts” to create a blog that auto-publishes based on mentions of specific alert topics sent to the email address specified. He says:

The idea is to create a self-perpetuating blog that will publish repeatedly based on the incoming alert feed. The project attempts to question the utility of these automated systems such as “Google Alerts” and how they are being used to aggregate and polarize opinions on the Internet.

I wonder if other blogs can get in this loop by writing about it (such as this post) / using a trackback? Google Alert Loop has an amazing logo!

Update: The site seems down, Google probably didn’t like this. Jonah has a page for the project. Here is what it looked like when I saw it:

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Well you’ve heard the story, Google launched the Social Graph API. Google searches and indexes all the social connections on the web and opens it up through an API, so that any web service can ask Google who you are and who you know. Like in Google search, a web crawler reads your web site, finds your public personal information, and stores it in a Google database. More specifically, when you add rel="me" to the links for your accounts in social web services and rel="friend" to the links for your friends’ website, you become a machine readable socialite.

This is definitely an industry cranking step, but it disappointing to see it as a centralized Google API rather than an open distributed system that anyone can host. Here I would like to look at what it means for different actors of the web:

• Users – When you sign up to a new social web service, you will get a recommendation: “12 of your friends are also using this service, add them as friends.” No more search for who is in.
• Service Providers – Provide more context to the new users, know what other things they use, what else they focus on. Monetize based on their interests.
• Google – As the aggregator, store all the social connections between people and capitalize on the massive trust network (see the edge types and 50,000 queries per day limit).

I agree that Social Graph API has more potential for user control and empowerment than in Facebook like closed models, but here I think Google uses brute force. We know that all that public FOAF, XFN data are collectable and servable through an API (I guess mybloglog has been doing it), but it is a huge cost to index and serve all that data. Should we applause this informational brute force achievement or should we focus on open/distributed solutions for the same problem?

For me being exploited is not a big deal, I am against it, I experiment with it, I’ve already disclosed my financials to the whole world with the MYPOCKET project (see what I’ve bought yesterday and what might I buy tomorrow). So I’ve just added a list of MACHINE READABLES on the side bar of this blog to experiment with this new system.

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A new open web API called OpenSocial enables developers to create social web applications that can run on any social network platform that has the Open Social interface standards. It is released by Google and a wide range of partners including Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Viadeo, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide. The list is growing, you can read more about Open Social’s business implications elsewhere including O’Reilly Radar, Techcrunch, Techmeme, New York Times, and Marc Andressen’s blog. It is confirmed that MySpace and Six Apart are also joining the club. No news from Facebook yet.

Apparently OpenSocial has a three part API that will enable people’s information flow on a network of service providers and third party applications across the web. Here is what they are and what they mean:

• Profile Information (user data) => Myself
• Friends Information (social graph) => My Relationships
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff) => My Life

As cheered elsewhere OpenSocial solves various problems for the three network actors:

• Service providers open their user database to other platforms. In turn they get more users (~100 million and more with MySpace) and more applications which generate more context (like in Facebook today). Obviously they increase their advertisement income significantly.
• Developers develop once, distribute on every social network. They provide context to platforms and in turn they get advertisement income (depending on the service provider’s policy).
• Users export their social graph to other services rather than re-declaring their friends again and again. They open their social relationships and their living activities to a variety of service providers and third party application developers. In turn they keep connected to their friends through various contexts, in other words they get “better services”.

So service providers will not OWN my data anymore?

First, what is “my data”? Is it my name? My education info? Is it my photos and videos? Is it my contact list? Is it how I am connected to my friends? Is it what I do together with my friends? Is it how I live? These are not clear.

Second, how much users get based on how much they give is also not clear. Our intellectual property that is generated by our labor, through our social relationships, and our living (activities) is not measurable by us but only by the service providers, who charge advertisers based on detailed stats. As these “networks of social networks” grow, complexity rises, and the value we generate becomes just more ambiguous for us.

I am looking forward to try the new OpenSocial API when it goes online and see how we can use it in Meta-Markets.

UPDATE: OpenSocial API is up and hacked by some guy already. I am currently reading the protocols. From what I understand, Google servers are the gate keepers between queries among the social networks. This makes the data ownership issues even worst.

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Check out the iPhone waiting line happening in front of the Apple Store 5th Ave, New York. This is a concrete Long Tail.

I got some live YouTube videos and Flickr streaming.

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“Angling in Troubled Waters” map by cartographer Fred W. Rose shows the European geopolitical situation in 1899. If you look at the details (see the larger version) you will see some countries such as Russia, UK, and Ottoman Empire are fishing. What do they catch? Blogger Catholicgauze says:

“…their ‘catches’ are in fact colonial possessions.”

This map, found via Boran Güney, is a neat example of the micro macro visualization technique. You can read through human figures and symbols across national borders.

What about today?

Architect Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA/AMO make dadaist montages of todays sociopolitical scenes on timelines and maps and they align them with architectural and cultural products. OMA/AMO’s 2004 book Content has an excellent article, “An Autopsy“, which is an annotated spatial montage of events and figures on a timeline from 1989 to 2003. Here are some pictures from An Autopsy article (taken with my cellphone camera):

An Autopsy is authored by Theo Deutinger, Maja Borchers, Matthew Murphy, Nanne de Ru, Max Schwitalla, Sebastian Thomas.

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After the feed stats company Feedburner is acquired by Google, the AdWords integration to feeds became the dominant discussion. Great! Your blog business can now be managed from a single Google interface right. This also means that your blog traffic data change hands. Feedburner puts a notice in their sign in interface saying that you have a right to opt-out, delete your data. If you take no action by June 15, 2007 (9 days as of today), the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google.

“Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via accountx@feedburner.com, provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.”

When YouTube acquired by Google no one asked YouTube users if they wanted to delete their YouTube account or videos. The same thing applies to all those small fish social data aggregating web 2.0 companies eaten by the whales (e.g., recently StumbleUpon swallowed by Ebay). It is nice of the Feedburner team that they are asking if we want to delete our accounts. Although I think that this notice is a legal enforcement to Feedburner since their clients are not only individuals but also companies.

So will you delete your Feedburner account?

I don’t think I will. Although I want to have control on my data, I can’t resist using Feedburner services currently (because of some embedded protocols). But watch us for an alternative action soon. I think this is an important moment to pay attention to how inhumane the data ownership laws in USA: One who aggregates data owns it.

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Yahoo! launches the Pipes service for everyone to reprogram resources on the web. It is a visual programming environment for aggregating and manipulating feeds, a “Mashup 2.0″ application in a way. Pipes derives its name from UNIX pipeline where the output of each process feeds directly as input of the next one. With Yahoo! Pipes output of web services can easily be hooked up to filters and manipulators, so you can chain a set of web services and processes.

A Pipe connecting two feeds from different news alerts based on the search query (simplified version of Aggregated News Alert).

There are already comprehensive Pipe reviews here, here, and here. Also check out the Aggregated News Alert pipe as an example to see how a pipe can be used. I will just point to details I found interesting. Each pipe has a permalink. You can run, clone, view the source of each pipe from the web interface. Any url can be used as an input, so RESTful urls become more important. A pipe can also be hooked up to another pipe as input. Pipes aggregates metadata similar to a usual web application. Run counts and Clone counts make a pipe hot or not. Yahoo! Pipes probably tracks the programming activity such as the counts for most used filters, resources, operators and their combinations. So Pipes aggregates metadata about programming as well.

Yahoo! Pipes will sure open various directions in the informational space. It will also accumulate capital through unpaid surplus labour performed by the Yahoo! users. Tim O’Reilly says: “What’s really lovely about this is that, like the Unix shell, Pipes provides a gradual introduction to web programming.”

Yeah that’s true, prosumers (producer + consumer) will learn how to program, so in a way Pipes enables programming for prosumers. I think Pipes is a powerful step for making the programming as part of the immaterial labor.

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Brent released the Yummy Tag Buffet, a bubble-up browsing tool for personal del.icio.us tags and bookmarks. Bubble-up is an interaction/visualization metaphor we were discussing in the PLW last year. It is basically the comparison of the sizes of emerging visual elements in time. As certain tags are repeatedly used, they emerge as dominant keywords in a tag cloud. As a result we can compare their growth in time. Check out Brent’s yummy timeline, it has nice features to discover. You can select a time interval, a week for example, and drag it on the timeline to see the frequency of the number of tags. Mouse over the bookmarks on the list and see related tags in the cloud. It is a nice bubble-up browser for digging into the aggregated information. Here is my del.icio.us bookmarks‘ tags for the last 6 months. Apparently programming, arts, networks, politics, collectivity, socialsoftware, economics, and techno-culture are the most used ones:

Related:
Brent also made one for Openstudio tags in the last summer.
Tom Coates of Plasticbag wrote about bubble-up folksonomies.

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