Imagine there is another Twitter-like service out there that had a SUL. Imagine that Dave has posted about this service before, and is an active user of it. Can you imagine a situation in which he wouldn’t have included that service’s SUL in one of his rants?

I sure can:

Dave hasn't complained about the FriendFeed SUL because he's on it

Dave: just stop. you’ll do and say anything to get what you want. even lie. even delete previous messages and reverse your opinion.

http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-winer-is-loren-feldmans-puppet

http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/davefeldman.png

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/the-rules-apply-to-everyone/

you have no integrity. you have no core ethics. it’s just all about you all the time.

This latest blowup began when Winer questioned Arrington’s integrity because TechCrunch is one of the suggested users recommended on Twitter. Winer sent a direct message to TechCrunch writer MG Siegler telling him to “stop fucking with RSS” because of an article arguing that RSS is dead. (Note that the article was by Steve Gillmor, not Siegler — Winer is a fucking genius.)

As you can see, Arrington is using Eye on Winer as a resource to document Winer’s hypocrisy. We compliment him on his good taste. They were best bros going back to the early days of TechCrunch — Arrington once served as his lawyer — but Arrington seems to have figured out why so many people in tech will never work with Winer.

If you know anyone else who hasn’t learned this lesson, send them to us.

Twitter is a big deal now. Calacanis used to be #1, now he’s a nobody. For a guy like him the difference is huge. And the resentment real.

About 21 hours ago from web

Winer keeps going on and on and on about Twitter’s suggested users list, which gave some celebs and tech A-listers many hundreds of thousands of followers compared to his 20,000. But as he bitches and moans about how follower counts like his used to make you a big deal, he completely ignores the fact that most of the people who read him on Twitter have followers in the hundreds or lower. He was perfectly happy with the inequalities of the system while he was on top. Now he’s Che Fucking Guevara.

Show of hands: Does anyone else other than Winer give a shit about the suggested users list or Twitter follow counts? Thanks to Twitter, we have learned that a 50-something obscure software developer wakes up every single day and gets his Depends in a bunch because Ashton Kutcher and Oprah and P. Diddy have more followers than he does. It’s a sad but hilarious spectacle to watch him go ape over any system that quantifies popularity and puts him at the top — as long as he stays there — and go all jilted lover when he falls off it.

Earth to Dave: You are not famous. You are Internet famous, which only means anything when something is new. When the rest of the world shows up, as they have on Twitter, the genuinely famous show up and that’s the end of your celebrity. On Twitter now your Internet fame is worthless. Ashton Kutcher craps out bigger celebrities than you each morning.

One more thing — it’s pretty obvious Arrington attacked me as a response to a piece I wrote the day before about Twitter giving flow to various friends, like TechCrunch. I went out of my way to say TC didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t want to make it personal, cause it wasn’t. And then Mike comes back with this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Problem is, Arrington’s piece makes explicitly clear why Dave was being singled out, and it wasn’t because he called out TC. It was, in essence, the same reason that we called him out a few weeks ago.

What’s great is watching Dave try to explain that Curry’s feed was appropriate and should’ve been included anyway. He calls the $10,000 payment a “gratuity”. One of two things is true: he thought Curry’s feed belonged there but let a friend pay him $10k for it anyway or he had no intention of including Curry until he got the payola. He can’t have it both ways. He’s either a jerk of unimaginable proportions or he’s lying through his teeth. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.

Dave’s “apology” is also incredibly weak on its face. After spending weeks bitching and moaning about not being included on Twitter’s suggested users list (what, does anyone actually believe this is about some deeper issue?) and making all sorts of insinuations about Twitter and the folks who got suggested user list spots he glosses over a much more egregious and ethically bankrupt action of his own with “I apologize for that.”

I’m not sure that Arrington’s comment about Winer’s lack of credibility is quite accurate though, as it seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Dave hasn’t had any for quite some time — it’s a side-effect of having no integrity, actually, something I imagine is just a product of his up-bringing.

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.

You can find the folder of archives here:

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/

Alright, so everyone Dave follows has had their Tweets stolen and re-hosted elsewhere. Why? Because Dave feels like it.

No regard for their intellectual property rights whatsoever. Selfish, but not at all surprising.

Someone Dave follows should send a DMCA takedown notice to Amazon. That could be entertaining.

Jonas Luster really broke down how silly the whole thing was and really touched a nerve with Dave. As one might expect, Dave’s little friends came rushing to his defense.

When it comes to innovation, there are only two options: do it first or do it better.

What Dave likes to do, is take an idea that has already been pretty well developed, and then toss a crappy implementation around it and promote the hell out of -himself- it. This pretty accurately describes his role in blogging, RSS, outlining, real-time status updates, vlogging, and pretty much any other technology he insinuates (or allows others to insinuate) that he came up with.

Dave’s “influence” on technology is largely myth. His influence on people who write about technology, though, is real.

Take one of the quotes Mr. Carpenter used to try to illustrate his piece (emphasis mine):

[The instant outliner] connects IM, weblog publishing (a weblog is essentially a published outline), RSS (if RSS items are brought into the outline), and outlining in a new way that radically improves team productivity.

Listen, a weblog is not “essentially a published outline”. Using an outliner to publish a weblog is a cute little hack, but the “essence” of blogging looks nothing like an outline, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves.

I have no doubt that Dave will continue to do things second (or third, or fourth) and pimp the hell out of them, finding meaning and inspiring qualities where none actually exist. That’s just “how he do”. It’s his shtick.