Dave Winer Fires Up a Brick at Yahoo
January 19th, 2008 by Bullshit MancusoYahoo programmer Premshree Pillai attended a Brickhouse presentation recently by Dave Winer of his software FlickrFan. His review:
I can’t believe he spoke for an hour or so on how he wrote a script that’d display Flickr images as a screensaver. D’oh!
Now if Dave were to read this he’d reason that I missed the point and that what he did was much more than that. But that’s Dave.
(Yes, Scoble was around. I think I remember seeing Aaron Swartz also.)
Update: Winer showed up on Pillai’s Flickr site and posted a response.
Just curious, why didn’t you talk about that at the meetup? There was a lot of discussion, you really should have had said your piece then and there. I suppose maybe I wasted a lot of time, maybe you could have done what I did in a lot less time. Maybe I could learn a lot from you. Shame that you didn’t offer to share your insights.
I wish I had a picture on my HDTV of Winer’s face when he read Pillai’s comment.
January 19th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
“I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.”
For some reason I’m reminded of Grampa Simpson’s rants about how we did things in the good old days. You know, when we could impress people by writing clever BASIC code.
January 19th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
The thing it that it’s not a “script”. It’s a product (as Dave like to refer to it). A product which is released. A script!? Ha!
January 19th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Yeah, if it were just a script it might be less bloated.
January 19th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
FlickrFan is deployed as a set of scripts written in UserTalk that run in the Frontier/Radio/OPML Editor codebase he recycles for each overhyped and underdelivered program he creates.
It’s like writing a couple Javascript scripts, zipping them up with Mozilla Firefox, and pretending that all of the functionality was delivered by your scripts.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:58 am
Winer’s response is gone. Wonder if he or the photographer deleted his remark.
January 21st, 2008 at 10:51 am
What’s amazing about Dave’s comment, is that if Pillai had said that to him during the demo, Dave would’ve been incensed. Furious. He would’ve tried to make an example of Pillai.
That’s why he doesn’t like the comment — he doesn’t get a chance to brow-beat and shout down the author.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
This incident reminds me of Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler panning Dave Winer’s presentation at its HQ.
Winer showed up at Dotzler’s blog with a snarky response too. Either he can’t handle even mild criticism from working coders or he’s hoping to whine them into silence.
January 21st, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Two possible outcomes for Pillai saying something during the presentation: Dave would have verbally abused him later for doing what he basically did to Calacanis last year at Gnomedex, or Dave would have just taken the idea, developed something around it (hey, another cheap script!), and called it his own creation–taking as much credit as possible along the way, of course.
Winer will either stalk you or steal from you. Or, hey, -both-. There’s no finer example of human being out there.