App.net is a bit of an odd duck. First, there’s the name, which is terrible. Conceptually, it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around and sell to your friends. It’s like Twitter, but you have to pay for it? But there’s also storage, like Dropbox, and people are building apps on the network (“oh, appdotnet, I get it. Wait.”) that are really nothing like Twitter.

I’ve been giving it a go mostly because the “figuring it out” part reminds me of mid-2007 era Twitter, but different. My pal Guy English put it smartly: this is for distilled insight, not quips, and I’ve found that mostly to be about right. Partly because you get more characters (bytes, not wisenheimers) but also because it feels different – it’s embarrassing to just crack jokes is about the only way I can put it.

Different, of course, does not mean better. For the most part, the talk is still very nerdy, very meta, the denizens too homogeneous. Kinda like the early days of Twitter.

The thing that’s missing is you. Statistically, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not on app.net, and that’s a shame. I’m a believer in Metcalfe’s Law and I’m interested in seeing if app.net can really branch into something different or if it will always just lie in the shadow of Twitter.

The folks behind app.net are really doing some incredible work. They’ve added new features and changed directions at an incredible clip, it’s been impressive to watch the growth and change. The ethos just sits right with me – I’m valued not as a faceless “user” to be monetized to brands, but as someone who contributes, in his own small way, to making the sum better.

And, they’ve been kind enough to give me a hundred free invites if you sign up via this link: https://join.app.net/from/jimray. The free tier has some limitations – you can only follow 40 other people, there’s less storage, that kinda thing – but it’s a great way to see if there really is anything to this un-Twitter.

A while back, there was some boastful kvetching about how app.net was better because of its exclusivity, in direct contradiction to what we know about the power of network effects, that its country clubbiness kept it nice and pristine. That kind of thinking is in every way antithetical to what I want from the world, and certainly the internet, so come on and muss it up a bit, won’t you?

How would you save journalism?

The excellent Priceonomics blog has a lengthy summary of some of the attempts to find new business models for journalism. Bonus: they experiment with a model of their own.

Welcome to the new qz.com

Watching Quartz’s launch, growth, and evolution has been fascinating. They’re doing phenomenal work, from the perspective of design, development, and editorial.

Telling the news on Twitter is different than telling the news in a magazine or newspaper. I realize journalists have a difficult job these days. The way mistakes are made and disseminated and the way they are corrected, is utterly different on Twitter than at a magazine like Wired or a newspaper like the New York Times. This places unfamiliar demands on journalists and novel demands on consumers of news. And the bigger burden is on the consumers, which I imagine makes the journalists especially cross. Because if we consumers want to have a real-time account of events–and we do, it really makes us a better informed citizenry–we have to understand how to deal better with ambiguity.

Consumers don’t just have to be “skeptical” or “critical thinkers” of breaking information: but they themselves have to operate as do journalists, by e.g., waiting for at least two independent sources as confirmation, and even then realize a piece of news only has some higher probability of being true. Tweets about older events have a lower threshold for warrant than breaking news, for obvious reasons. The price of timeliness is eternal vigilance.

I can understand the temptation to want to edit some (perceived) egregious fallacy you accidentally helped perpetuate, but that’s not how things work on Twitter. Delete the tweet, tweet a correction, or write an elaborate apology on your blog. It will harm your reputation to make a careless error, but on the other hand the audience should know to expect corrections when who-they-follow switch to the breaking-news game. And the audience wants breaking news, warts and all.

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Nick Kallen, who was a platform engineer at Twitter, wrote a good technical and philosophical response to Mat Honan’s request for a Twitter edit button. I still think Mat’s idea has merit but Kallen deftly explains why it’s beyond non-trivial.

This quote, about “telling news on Twitter”, though, is where Kallen reaches too far, irresponsibly so. It reads like Frankenstein promising his creation really is the key to eternal life, plus he’s great with kids, probably.

Kallen casually tosses out that a fire hose of real-time news makes for “a better informed citizenry” with absolutely nothing resembling a fact to back this claim up. I’m certainly unaware of anything that suggests the rush of breaking news equates to better democracy. In fact, everyone I know who seriously studies how breaking news affects news comprehension hypothesizes the end result is a net loss.

The fact is, we don’t yet know whether, as Kallen claims, “a real time account of events” actually does make for better citizens (and democracies) and probably won’t for some time. I suspect, though, that the proliferation of “slow news”1 we’ve seen as a response to the Chinese water torture of news-like updates is an indication that our fellow citizens yearn for, and deserve, better. And, let’s not forget, those stodgy old newspapers often still manage to tell the story best.

Kallen also suggests part of the solution is to shift the cognitive burden of figuring out fact from fiction back to readers2, that ambiguity and eternal vigilance are the prices we pay for an 86400000 millisecond news cycle. Call me old school, but I preferred when a journalist was someone we could trust to get it first, but first, get it right , instead of simply blasting out what any mope could hear coming across the police scanner.

I’ll note that I’m not laying the blame for the problems of breaking news at Twitter’s feet. These problems really aren’t new, they were with us long before Noah Glass wrote Twitter’s first Rails controller. In fact, I’d suggest that Twitter is perhaps uniquely suited to help solve these problems, beyond just an edit button, by putting all that Big Data to use sorting fact from rumor. Being the heart through which so much of the world beats has got to be useful for something more than telling me the kids still like Justin Bieber.

I’m no luddite and, perhaps surprisingly to my friends who work there, still have love in my heart for Twitter. I want to believe they can crack the secret to helping me know – really know, not just thumb through – the world I live in. Even if it’s not an edit button, I want to believe they’re trying.

By “slow news” I’ll (begrudgingly) include both the algorithmic summarizers that seek to distill the news of the day by Hadooping a never-ending supply of reverse pyramid wire copy and (more optimistically) the human touches of sites like The Brief or Evening Edition. And, yes, I had a hand in the genesis of Evening Edition so there lies my bias. ↩︎

A, perhaps fussy, stylistic point: I truly loathe the word “consumer”, particularly as it’s applied to what we once referred to as “readers”. The word conjures a gaping maw, shoveling in the byproduct of some faceless corporation, barely stopping to chew, let alone think, and its overuse by the wunderkinds of new new media betrays a certain intention, does it not? ↩︎

Twitter’s music app is beautiful, in that now-tiresome way apps from VC-backed companies are required to be, sacrificing utility for aesthetics and looking dated as soon as it hits your neighborhood app store. That’s fine, they’ve got plenty of designers to restyle it every 18 months.

Mechanically, it works quite well, exactly what you’d expect a music app on an iPhone today to be, down to properly responding to the standard library of earbud remote shortcuts. As of 1.0.3, it’s plenty stable, less buggy than you might expect given the general unreliableness of networks and streaming media. Linking an Rdio or Spotify account is seamless, and a clever runaround of what would surely be a thorny negotiation with the music biz, to boot.

The Popular pane is useless to anyone over the age of 17. Emerging seems to simply be the inverse of Popular and is therefore equally hopeless. Swipe over to Suggested and we’re finally getting somewhere, save for the fact that the secret sauce of what makes an artist “suggested” is completely opaque. I have no idea1 what I should do to improve the algorithmic guidance or what the fuck @beth_orton is doing in there.

Tellingly, you can’t get to a musician’s tweets from within the app to decide whether you want to follow them based on the content of their stream, you’re just supposed to follow all of your favorite musicians and be in awe of their celebrity, I guess.

The #NowPlaying pane gets to the heart of what’s really wrong with the app and, may I suggest, Twitter circa 2013. In order for this 25% of the app to be useful, the people I trust and follow must also auto-tweet what they’re listening to, complete with hashtag detritus (or trolls). Perhaps I’m just too far past what Twitter considers cool, but a stream littered with #NowPlaying refuse (or Vines or Foursqure check-ins, for that matter) is a sign that I need to spend some quality time with the unfollow button. Twitter has built an app that requires users to abuse their timelines and followers with machine tags without any meaningful way of tuning out that noise.

Worse still, a recommendations engine built on top of who I follow on Twitter is not solving the problem of introducing me to new music, it’s reminding me how many of my friends have terrible taste (relative to my obviously awesome library, natch). Context matters, it’s why the intersection of my sets of Rdio and Twitter friends is actually pretty small and that’s ok. Again, maybe it matters to tweens that your best friends are also totally into @OneDirection or whatever but that’s no way for anyone past puberty to live.

Sadly, the music app also says plenty about where Twitter is going. They long ago gave up any pretense of subverting the mainstream, cozying up to the likes of MTV and NBC, and are now fully focused on being yet another megaphone for the world’s already over-exposed. Let us welcome our new new media overlords, same as the old overlords, it seems.

You can see how this plays out: more hashtagged “verticals” for #tv #movies #celebrities #gossip #news2 #food #etc, more courting verified b-list celebs, further metastasizing our streams. If you were wondering how Twitter was planning on paying back the more than $1 billion in venture capital they’ve stacked up, while also minting another generation of Silicon Valley [b|m]illionaires, here’s a clue.

Of course, it’s their prerogative3 to be an adjunct to and tool of the mainstream media. Let’s just not confuse the story of what Twitter is today with something that continues to be interesting.

It seems like the suggestions algorithm is keyed to the musicians you follow on Twitter, since that’s pretty much the only meaningful metric Twitter has bothered to tap into. I only follow two musicians: Aimee Mann, because I think she’s hilarious and she likes my polititweets; and John Roderick, a pal from Seattle who for some dumb reason doesn’t merit the proper “musician” badge. ↩︎

The events of last week and how poorly they were covered on Twitter (and the tired old dogs like CNN being wagged by Twitter’s tail) should disabuse anyone of the notion that a Twitter news app is anything resembling a good idea. ↩︎

As of press time, @KingBobbyBrown remains unverified, which is a god damn shame. ↩︎

There’s a temptation when tragedy hits–especially violent tragedy–to use it to prove a worldview right as people take to Twitter to transform dead and mangled bodies into scaffolding under a preexisting belief. It’s execrable. Whether it’s a rush to assign blame, a speculation regarding motive, or an I-told-you-so matters little. That kind of stuff can play badly enough in a next day op-ed, but in an unedited 140 character tweet issued shortly after some terrible thing has just gone down, it’s pure poison.

—Mat Honan makes a strong case for how the best response to a tragedy, on Twitter or elsewhere, is to shut up.

Just like the major Schedule A deductions, most of the thousands of other tweaks to the tax code reflect the influence of special interests—whether they be rich people, the Metropolitan Museum, or the National Association of Homebuilders—rather than rational economic or social policymaking. And it has created one other group that benefits from a miserable tax day—the army of attorneys, tax preparers, and tax software creators who hunt for deductions and exemptions on our behalf. These people create a strong lobby against efforts to simplify the tax code and the tax filing system—including the idea of the IRS preparing a draft return that you could simply accept or amend as necessary.

Remove all the deductions and exemptions, and you’d be able to reduce top tax rates, reverse the impact of the sequester, or draw down the deficit—all at once. You’d also considerably reduce the angst of tax day for millions of Americans and even allow for a downsizing of the IRS and the tax industry itself. On April 15, surely that should be an idea with immense political appeal.

—A rather compelling case against tax deductions. Don’t forget, the reason taxes are so unnecessarily complicated is because Grover Norquist and Intuit spend millions of dollars lobbying to keep it that way.

Overall, the reaction to political events on Twitter reflects a combination of the unique profile of active Twitter users and the extent to which events engage different communities and draw the comments of active users. While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide.

—Pew says reaction to events on Twitter is doesn’t necessarily jibe with broad public opinion.

Priceonomics Blog: The Price of Health Care is Too Damn High

The charts accompanying this post tell a truly stunning tale.

Let’s get some perspective here: Summly wasn’t reading Ulysses by James Joyce and extracting the fact that the three-masted ship Leopold Bloom sees on the horizon is a metaphor for the Holy Trinity and therefore represents the Catholic Church. It wasn’t reading a 12 page article in Harper’s and extracting the cleverest puns and pop culture send-offs lovingly embedded by a writer who is good at his craft and earning below his potential. And it wasn’t taking my blog posts and somehow conveying the nuanced ennui I harbor for bolt-on engineering.

It was summarizing news. Articles that are already written with a TL;DR in the first paragraph.

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E. Gün Sirer on one of several things that are actually wrong with Yahoo’s purchase of Summly.

Don’t miss the wonderful mini-rant on TL;DR culture.