Eye on Winer

Dave solves the Twitter authentication issue, and I “solves” I mean “does absolutely nothing to solve”.

The Twitter authentication problem is two-fold:

1. You cannot grant access to the account to a service without granting them full control of it.
2. Once they have access, there’s no way to revoke it, short of changing your password.

The caveat to any solution is that it needs to be as easy as possible for both the application developers and the users. Dave’s proposed solution addresses neither of these, really.

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This is classic:

When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that’s true we’re really fucked.

Here’s how I reasoned…

1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.

2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we’re dead, so you’d better start looking for a new job

The only logical way to proceed is to:

Whoa there, partner. Dave might have set a record for logical fallacy to word ratio. First of all, most people are stupid, so it stands to reason that most of your customers are, too. Here’s the key: stupid people often make good decisions. Even if your product is the most amazing thing ever, just choosing your product does not make them a genius.

After all, if your product is so great, even a moron would see that it was the best, right?

Right.

This might have made a decent motivational speech, but it’s TERRIBLE business. Especially in software.

You can treat people with respect regardless of how intelligent you think they are. When you’re writing software, though, it’s best to assume your user is stupid. This post nicely sums up why most of the stuff Dave writes is horribly cryptic, though:

He expects everyone using it to be a genius. We know, from our past experiences with Dave, that “being a genius” means thinking exactly like him. Makes sense. To use any of the stuff he’s written you basically have to ask yourself: “What would Dave do?”

What’s more pathetic — Dave Winer’s New Year’s Day dump on Robert Scoble

You can’t be on Twitter or FriendFeed and not be inundated with comments from and about Scoble. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s really annoying. I find myself relaxing when he takes a break from Twitter, for example to fly from Europe to the US. Finally I can speak without having everything one-upped by Scoble. Whatever it is, he’s done it better, or bigger, or with more important people. It’s irritating because I don’t believe it. I’d really like it if he just turned down the volume. I’d really like it if he just turned down the volume. Or if there were a way to segment the Twittersphere, I’d like to be in the part where Scoble isn’t the main topic of conversation 24-by-7.

or Scoble lapping it up like 2 Girls 1 Cup?

Interesting post and one I’ll consider! I clicked like on it in friendfeed so that all my followers could see it. I also retweeted it. I think I’ll do a video on how to get rid of Robert Scoble out of your view. It’s actually not that hard thanks to the “block” feature in friendfeed.

As James Robertson points out, there’s already a way to “segment the Twittersphere,” and it’s called the Remove button.

I never thought I’d see the day… but it turns out that Dave does actually understand why sites like EyeOnWiner exist (emphasis supplied):

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

On behalf of all authors, readers, and commenters here at EOW… you’re very welcome.

I smell a new tagline… “EyeOnWiner . . . cleaning up Dave’s environmental disasters, one post at a time.”

Why am I not at all surprised that Dave has his panties in a knot about his Netflix service being suspended because he didn’t pay it.

I mean… what else is there to say? He doesn’t pay his bill and Netflix are the assholes and losers.

One has to wonder if Dave even called or if he just expected Netflix to have a special “do not suspend for non-payment” flag on his account because he’s Dave Fucking Winer.

Seems like an awfully trivial thing to throw a little temper tantrum over, no? You can just hear him screaming “Don’t you know who I am!?” Heh.

It turns out that Dave Winer isn’t washed up after all. His “River of News” led to the creation of both Facebook and Twitter, according to one of his recent tweets:

@Scobleizer — Matt is a mensch. R.O.N. was the prototype for what Facebook became & Twitter. Idiot programmers thought itwas abt format. 11:04 PM November 26, 2008 from web in reply to Scobleizer

For some reason this fact is missing from Winer’s Wikipedia entry. To the Davepole, Betsy Devine!

After announcing its closure last week, Dave Winer changed his mind and kept running NewsJunk — his latest overhyped product. A look at the traffic stats on Alexa and Compete shows that he needn’t have bothered.

The site’s a dud. The latest Compete stats show that NewsJunk fell to 2,300 users in the entire month of October, even though it was the height of the presidential campaign when most political news sites were shattering traffic records.

The site’s traffic peak was 32,000 users after it got some press from Mashable and other easy marks in the Web 2.0 world who think everything Winer shits out is worth sifting through for corn. But if you compare NewsJunk’s traffic to Memeorandum, which Winer claimed as his competition, his site got killed. (And Memeorandum spiked towards Election Day, while NewsJunk entered into a death spiral.)

Winer bitched last week on Mashable about how they didn’t get the appeal of his site (them and just about everybody else on the planet):

This is a work of fiction. You should put a big disclaimer on it up front — you’re wrong on so many fronts, and you missed what was interesting technically about the product and you’re supposed to be a tech pub.

It’s amazing that Winer thinks there’s anything technically novel about the site, which is just a human-selected list of RSS items from media feeds that counts clicks. The programming and concept are both trivial. You could code it in an afternoon and still have time left over to walk the dog.

As NewsJunk suffers the same fate as Flickrfan and Share Your OPML, even with all of Winer’s pimping on Scripting News, is he completely washed up? It’s been a long time since he was involved in anything that could even charitably be described as a success.

I never thought a post of Dave’s would open up in my feed reader and I would find myself sighing with relief. Today that happened: Dave wrote a coherent, reasonable, and articulate piece in which he engaged in no mud-slinging or hypocrisy.

Of course, it was about technology, not politics. Go figure.

Back in 2005, Dave Winer got into a bizarre raging argument with other bloggers at the BlogNashville conference while he was moderating a panel on blog civility. That’s not sarcasm. The topic really was civility. Stan Brown, one of the people in attendance, described Winer’s meltdown:

As others have noted, he (Winer) got into a ridiculous exchange with John Cox that got really heated and went on and on and on to the point that people in the room began to get really uncomfortable. At that point, someone wondered if Dave was trying to conduct some kind of encounter group. As others have noted, his treatment of Robin Burk was totally out of line. He was rude quite often. About a third of the way through, he took a deep breath, slowed everything down and mentioned we still had another hour to go. I was actually feeling sympathy for him at this point. It occurred to me that perhaps he was taking medications that he had forgotten to bring with him on this trip.

That’s the back story for today’s gratuitous insult against Nashville on Scripting News, in case you were curious. Winer’s hatred has grown from one roomful of bloggers to the entire city.

Given this, it’s funny to read the recent weblog post by Rex Hammock, a friend who’s been coming to Winer’s defense for years and years:

I know that most of the people who read this blog are not from Nashville. However, my style of blogging has always been to keep it personal. And one of the most personal things about me is my love of a place I call home, Nashville, Tennessee.

Hammock’s attempt back in ‘05 to rationalize Winer’s obnoxious behavior at BlogNashville is still a pungent example of asskissery:

From what I’ve observed, Dave is a designer of (a visionary of?) and defender of common grounds. … Like Real Simple Syndication (RSS), one of Dave’s earlier battles for common ground, we’re now struggling to discover the protocols of what I would call Real Simple Values.

Dear Dave,
Get real. I suspect that there isn’t a single Republican on the planet who gives so much as half a damn what you think. For starters, this paragraph is pretty blatant ass-kissing:

I know some of you are honorable people, good Americans, taxpayers, people who love your families, pay your taxes, do your best to live by the Golden Rule. People who try to do the right thing, whatever that is. It’s to those Republicans that I wish to have a few words.

After all of the screeds we’ve read about your disdan for Republicans, how they’re stupid and evil, to then turn around and try to butter them up is just absurd. If you believe what you wrote, you owe those Honorable Republicans a gigantic apology for the way you’ve maligned them for simply having a (R) next to their names in the past. I suspect, though, that you don’t mean it, and that’s fine, because someone has to off-set the crazy Republican partisans, and that job falls to crazy Democratic partisans.

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