Dave Winer hates FeedBurner, the feed publishing and stat tracking service bought by Google last year for $100 million, as he showed in this recent mopey Twitter update:
i’ll get flamed for this, but that’s how i felt about feedburner. never even said hello, much less thanks.
Because he hates FeedBurner, Winer linked to a weblog post yesterday accusing the service of playing favorites to benefit Google Reader over the competition. The charge was bogus and quickly refuted.
This is just the latest example of Winer spreading disingenuous bullshit, FUD and outright paranoia about the company.
Why he expects to be thanked for this remains a mystery.
At the time of posting, I noted a caveat asking readers to say if they had seen the same thing. As soon as it was determined it was a cookie issue, we noted that right away. Dave, taking my first post at face value, linked its way. But I wouldn’t label it as “the charge was bogus”. I’d label it as I did above. I found it was incorrect, and said so.
You deserve credit for updating your post, but I don’t think it was unfair to call your accusation bogus. As you’ve said, your initial suspicions have been proven false. Your original headline, “FeedBurner Defaults to Google Over Other RSS Readers,” lacked a question mark. The slant of your entry presumed Google was gaming FeedBurner.
Dave’s gifts remind me my my sister in-laws presents.
When she visits she looks for them everywhere and when she can’t find them she asks what we did with her clock (or whatever). She paid for them and still onsiders them to be hers even though she gave them as gifts.
Dave views RSS, podcasting, OPML in this fashion. Feedburner made $100M from Dave’s “gift” of RSS and he didn’t profit from the deal… He’s amazed.
Dave has effectively done well on his gifts… notably the sale of weblogs.com to Verisign. Of course, there was a “value based” business (UserLand) that also believed they deserved more than a “Hello” on that little $2M trnsaction.
Dave’s pulling the plug on the “share.opml.org” web site/service. For several reasons, IMHO:
It’s coded in PHP and he has to pay Dan MacTough (or whomever) to change anything… like getting it to actually share OPML back with anyone that wants a copy of the input file. Some came back hoping they could get a back-up on their OPML a few days later… but they shared it with Dave. He didn’t intend to share it back with them or anyone else. Share is a one-way concept for some people.
It’s dying becuase he isn’t pushing it.
He’s spending money on his new hacks: FlickrFan and “PodLickr” (or whatever he decides to call it). Those AP photos he’s passing out for free all come from Amazon’s “pay per download” S2 storage service. I have downloaded them many times over to Windows systems as I play with re-scripting his service. At some point he’ll stop giving away files. It’s expensive if it scales to a few thousand users and he’s NOT giving away new photos so the news value is deprecating over time.
So… bye-bye “share.opml.org”. The OMPL Editor will probably be the next “gift” to be cancelled because his new delivery model is a turn-key instance of the OMPL Editor per application release. Using several at on the same client will just break the web server.
There’s only one Dave… and he can’t possibly scale to meet the opportunites he envisions.
McD, what do you mean he’s not giving away new photos? There are 33 new photos in the feed just today. I have a Python script that downloads and organizes them for me (newest images first instead of last, so that OS X’s screensaver shows the latest stuff at the start) so I can avoid running Frontier or whatever.
Jon:
I’m assuming the photo feed is:
http://static.flickrfan.org/ap/rss.xml
The text I get when downloading the rss.xml hasn’t changed since Jan 2. If FlickrFan is using a new feed for AP Photos I’d love to know what that feed URL is…
I don’t use a Mac but I have one and I can check with an upgraded FlickFan but I’d love to know the feed Dave’s using.
FlickFan can get aditional photos from other RSS feeds… like a personal Flickr account or a subscribed RSS photo feed but the AP photo feed has been frozen for my scripts since Jan 2.
Thanks for selling me a clue. We don’t think dave has the rights to actually distribute AP photos… there was a post here about this issue but it died without any one working the story investigatively and the Yahoo Brickhouse “Public Demo” didn;t clarify the rights FlickFan users have for re-use of the AP photos. The legalese is embedded in the RSS feed metadata and hinted at in the frightening EULA for FlickFan. But clarity? None can be seen.
Dave uses ignorance and obfuscation as the ultimate defense for legal issues, IMHO.
It appears the feed is now http://static.flickrfan.org/ap2/rss.xml
Yea, he changed the feed address on the 2nd. Since FlickrFan auto updates (sometimes!) it was never announced on the feed itself.
Personally I love the feed and wouldn’t want to do anything to screw it up. I’ve never seen anything like it available. I’d pay a few bucks a month to access it directly from the AP, but they are all B2B.
Wine-a-lot:
Thanks! A new batch of 34 photos are downloading as I write.
I just noticed that the enclosure items in the feed have an extra “/” in the URI before the host name. For example <enclosure url=”http:///static.flickrfan.org/ap2/2008/01/23/2376.jpg” type=”image/jpeg” length=”1006059″ />
This has the effect that iPhoto will not download the photos if one subscribes to the feed. A corrected feed, however, works just fine. This could very well be the result of a typo on Dave’s part and poor URI handling in iPhoto. (A web browser, for instance, has no problem resolving.)
On a Mac it would is fairly easy to set a cron task to regularly fetch the feed and strip out the extra slash. (Google crontab and Mac; “curl http://static.flickrfan.org/ap2/rss.xml | sed ’s/http:\/\/\//http:\/\//’ > fixedRSS.xml” should work as the command.) From there you can subscribe to this corrected feed in iPhoto and do whatever you like with it. Ideas: 1) A slideshow (Step 1: press the little play button. Done). 2) Use the images for a desktop background slideshow. (Step 1: In Desktop settings, under iPhoto Albums, select the feed. Done. Oh, is there a much more complicated method of doing this?)
I should have said, Firefox has no problem resolving the triple-slash URI. Safari cannot do it.
Yea, I am not sure what the three slashes are for. It very well could be to make sure iPhoto can’t do the job for you (which is silly, but hey so is writing your own scripting environment to accomplish such basic tasks). It can already handle the RSS feeds from Flickr and there are sites out there to make custom feeds (for keywords and what not). Which means it does the same exact thing as FlickrFan.
Since the images are pretty big and I only want the latest in my screen saver folder, I avoided the shell script manner and did a bit extra in Python. It syncs a local folder with the feed (deleting the ones no longer present) and then reverses the ordering so that the last image is alphabetically first which makes it show up first in the screen saver. It also has an option to show new images on the desktop (as a SS) as they come in.
Let me know if you want it. Besides the desktop screen saver part it should be cross platform.
I wouldn’t mind looking at it. I think I’d like to try writing something myself, too. It’s an excuse to practice a bit of scripting.
http://www.jongales.com/code/ap.py
Usage: python /path/to/ap.py /path/to/images/
Obviously most useful when automated by cron. The first time will take a while (downloading 200+MB) but then after that it only downloads the new ones so it takes a minute or so. On my laptop it’s 1-3% CPU when in use, I wish I could say that about the OPML Editor!
I have my little AP photo feed script listed on my blog:
http://bloganon.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/scripting/
I tried copying the text here but there are too many characters that can’t get past the wordpress text entry processing.
You might notice the “sed” stage to fix the triple slashes in the URL.
I still think Dave is violating the terms of his AP photo license by making these images available an RSS feed.
He gets away with violations of content that make his business interests untenable.
I don’t think his NY Times River of News is kosher either… but they are probably looking the other way. I noticed the NY Times announced a Mobile deal with AT&T so Dave’s hack will probably get taken down since he’s probably signed up for the service and hacked re-publishing the text.
You can’t base a sustainable business on re-purposing commercially protected content. So, Dave’s “businesses” are not sustainable, IMHO.
Al of Dave’s efforts at this point are intended to get commericial interests to open their content for re-purposing: NetFlix, Yahoo, etc are all targets for his influence.
He’s not making anything off these sites (or even trying), so that’s probably helping him out. The NY Times site is just an RSS feed shown online, so I don’t see where that would be causing any trouble.
Jon:
“The NY Times site is just an RSS feed shown online”
What is the NY Times feed that Dave is using… I think they offer the feed to mobile phone users that sign up and Dave has re-purposed that feed thus disintermediating the NY Time readers from their mobile service. That’s what I think is a conflict. The NY Times probably is building an audience and then trying to do deals with Mobile providers… sometime that might be doomed to fail but Dave’s News River just makes their business model fail faster.
Anyway, if the NY Times RSS composite “mobile” feed is public and not a subscription then I’m full of shit… but ready to clean up.
All the permalinks in the NY Times River point to the NY Times mobile site, so their business wouldn’t be hurt beyond getting less front page traffic.
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html
I just added the business feed to a reader and the headlines are the same (including descriptions). Actually his site is behind a little bit. The difference being he’s linking to the mobile site and not the main site. The difference in the URLs is minimal and easily automated–change “www” to “mobile” and the ending “.html” to “.xml”.
Yet another one of his “apps” that is nothing more than a tiny script that could be handled a lot more efficiently in something other than Frontier.
Jon:
“their business wouldn’t be hurt beyond getting less front page traffic.”
Do you think anyone else could register a domain like:
nytimesriver.com
And then use it to create a summary/outline of NY Times Mobile Formatted content and not get a call from their attorneys?
Of course, Dave, explains:
This site is an experiment to see how we can make news work for people who use mobile web browsers.
He always uses “we” when he needs to sell something: like a site that re-purposes content. He keeps hoping that the NY Times will link to his innovative use of the mobile web and RSS.
Fair enough… since he gave them RSS. He gave us all RSS. He should be able to take some advantage.
The fact that he’s got NYTimes in the domain does mean they can shut him down anytime they want. But I still don’t think he’s doing anything unfair with their RSS feed. It’s a mashup. If he was hosting full articles or something, then there would be no question. But he’s showing no more than they already give away (and explicitly allow you to put on your site).
The site likely gets little traffic, but what it does get is good for the NY Times. Their mobile pages have ads on them.
As an experiment I just went to mobile.nytimes.com with my user agent set to iPhone (FireFox’s UserAgentSwitcher is great for stuff like this) and their homepage is essentially a much more nicely styled version of the River. And up to date, the River hasn’t been updated for 14 hours. So yea, this is all a moot point. The NY Times already does what Dave does, but they do it better.
Looks like there are some recent changes to the AP feed… Some links are now in the form htp://, others in http:// and now none in http:///. I updated my script accordingly, but it’s definitely an odd change. You’d think it would be all or nothing (since it’s automated and all). And what’s with all the blatant HTTP errors?