Via Jacob Grier, a very convincing post against URL shorteners.
The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. [...] The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. [...] The clicker can’t even tell by hovering where a link will take them, which is bad form.
I completely agree. (Actually, it turns out that I complained about TinyURL back in 2004 [in a post that now has a mildly broken permalink, amusingly enough].)
I think these services were useful for their original purpose (reducing the likelihood that copy-pasted links would break in emails/Usenet posts). I never understood why people started using them instead of direct links on the web, but I hoped that they would die out, one silver lining to the HTML email cloud.
Then came Twitter! I enjoy working with the 140-character limit, and it does make sense to use shortened URLs in this case. If people would restrict their use of shortened URLs to Twitter, the downsides wouldn’t bug me much - Twitter is kind of supposed to be ephemeral, so the effects of link rot are not terrible, and if a service did get hacked, the news would spread quickly enough! But this has caused a general resurgence of the fad (again, I don’t understand it), and it’s driving me nuts again.
I’m tempted to say that Twitter caused this problem and ought to fix it. I see two possible ways to do that: Twitter could roll their own URL shortener, ensuring that as long as Twitter is around, links in tweets will work. (This might require blocking use of other URL shorteners, which sounds attractive to me although of course it’s not that simple.) Or Twitter could create some sort of “relevant link” field so URLs wouldn’t need to go in tweets at all. (I think this would be great; people doing Twitter by SMS can’t click links anyway.)
It might be too late, though - now that everybody and their local newspaper is on Twitter, the strange attraction of the short obfuscated URL might have spread too far to be stopped.
P.S. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do when I read the above-linked post was Twitter it. I thought it would have been kind of funny to use a link shortener, but it turned out that I fit the link in without a problem. Then Twitter automatically turned it into a TinyURL link. Thank you, Twitter.
Somebody recently invited me to a Facebook group called “We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. We Are Gone If This Happens” (currently with 3,815,847 members).
Apparently in light of Google’s interest in Twitter, I’ve been seeing people talking about how they’re not going to pay to use Twitter.*
What I want to know is, what makes these people think Facebook and Twitter have any intention of ever charging users for their services? It has become abundantly clear that social sites are valuable because of the content they create and the users they attract - that value is much more than what individual users would be willing to pay for the utility they derive from the sites. Site owners can hardly have failed to notice this.
So not only is there no reason to think Facebook, Twitter, or others would think it wise to start charging for services, there’s no precedent. What social sites/services have started out free and gone pay? Blogger? Gmail? Wordpress? Flickr? MySpace? Friendster? Orkut? Some have prospered, some have failed, but none have gone pay-only. (Some certainly charge for added services, but I don’t think many people have a problem with Flickr, for example, letting you pay for even more storage space.)
I can only think of one site that’s gone pay, and that’s Salon’s Table Talk. Haven’t heard much about Salon lately? Yeah, me neither. I don’t think other entrepreneurs are going to be taking their business decisions as a model anytime soon.
*funny that I now think “seeing people talking” is a valid construction.
I’m spending a lot of time in the hospital now that my clinical rotations have started, which is leaving less time and energy for other things like blogging, and I decided to simplify my life by just not doing anything that I’m not finding necessary or fun, hence the paucity of posts. I am very much liking the rotations though. The first month I was on outpatient medicine, which is supposed to be kind of a vacation but actually turned out to be half inpatient medicine and quite the challenge, but I loved the work. For the past five weeks I’ve been on inpatient medicine, first general internal medicine and now cardiology. I really like this too; taking care of patients is interesting and fulfilling. So that’s good.
Other good stuff (some a bit belated since my internet surfing has been curtailed):
Why blogs should provide full-text RSS feeds: it’s good for business. You’re not going to keep people from using RSS readers (especially the high-volume readers who, really, are who you most want reading your blog), and providing partial text is more likely to just make them stop reading than click over every day. There are some great blogs that I used to read before I made the RSS switch, but their crappy feed quality means I haven’t really kept up - there is so much else out there. And there’s more than one blog where I’m not interested in all the posts, but I am interested in many of discussions in the comments, so I usually do click over if there are interesting posts, even once I’ve already read the whole text.
The Pantsuit Paradox: “How do women signal power at the boys’ club?” It’s an excellent article about a real dilemma: women have no equivalent of the suit and tie, an outfit that projects professionalism and authority and nothing else. We have to worry about whether we look too girly or not feminine enough, too sexy or too matronly, too trendy or too stodgy-librarian. (I do think there’s an excellent role for the businesslike pantsuit well-cut for the female shape; I am not sure why female politicians don’t seem to use them more, but then the viewpoint that for women, dressing up = skirt is still definitely out there.) Luckily a white coat and stethoscope go a long way toward projecting professionalism and authority, so I don’t have to worry too much about this anymore. Although I did see in one of the dress codes that women are supposed to wear T-shirts under scrubs; no word about men. I guess risking a hint of cleavage is much more unprofessional than letting all your chest hair hang out.
Tim convinced me that I should start using a newsreader, so while I’ve been procrastinating, I mean taking study breaks, I’ve been setting up an account at Bloglines. It does make it a lot faster to keep up with my regular reads, especially those (coughScienceBlogscough) that load really slowly. And it’s so easy to add new subscriptions! I think that might end up outweighing the time savings by encouraging me to follow many more blogs.
Genetic Savings & Clone, a biotechnology company that sold cloned pets, sent letters to its customers last month informing them it will close at the end of the year because of little demand for cloned cats. The company had recently reduced the price from $50,000 to $32,000.
The article discusses some reasons why the company didn’t make it. One that isn’t mentioned, but I think is plausible, is slightly increased scientific literacy.
Back in 2000 when this company started up, whenever people talked about clones you got the impression they were imagining creepy “Attack of the Clones” scenarios. Obviously plenty of people still haven’t put any further thought into it, but in the past several years you’ve started to see people recognizing that clones are actually identical twins, as I noted in a Brainwash article awhile ago.
Perhaps once people realized that their $50,000 would get them not a carbon copy of dear departed Fluffy, but a completely different cat sharing Fluffy’s genes, they decided it wasn’t worth the money. Imagine that.
Now that I think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if another issue was trouble getting qualified people to work for them - what scientist would want to work for a company whose entire business plan consists of taking advantage of people’s misconceptions about science?
Maybe it should’ve been the Scientists, Engineers, and Computer Programmers for America.
(Check out the letters you have to type in to join. Compare them to the web address. Read this if you want to know what captcha means.)
Lately I’ve had time to catch up on my blog-reading, and I noticed that yet another of my favorite science blogs has moved to scienceblogs.com. The Loom joins The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, Good Math, Bad Math, Pharyngula, and Respectful Insolence as blogs on my frequent-reads list that have made the move.
I can’t help being somewhat annoyed by this. I know certain people will laugh at me, but I don’t use an RSS reader, preferring to visit each blog individually. I’m interested in web design and like to see different looks. Sure, I have strong aesthetic biases, but even the best and least annoying design I come up with gets dull after awhile. I enjoy checking out what other people think looks good. Variety is pleasant. (Granted, certain blogs are so painful to look at that they tempt me to move to RSS, but those are blessedly rare.) So I don’t really like seeing the same look at every science blog I read.
Furthermore, scienceblogs.com loads inexcusably slowly. I suspect a lot of that is due to the bloggers’ habits of including lots of pictures, but I don’t remember the same people’s blogs being so slow when they were on their own sites. And of course all that bandwidth is now being pulled from one site, but if you want to be big, you have to invest in the infrastructure to handle it.
Probably the biggest reason to dislike the consolidation is that when the site does something really stupid like hosting a flash ad that makes tornadoes fly over the text, the annoyance is present on all those blogs!
I don’t blame the bloggers - especially once you get to a certain popularity level, it has to be a huge annoyance to deal with website stuff rather than focusing on your writing, so having that taken care of by somebody else is a great deal. (I have to say, the webmasters at scienceblogs are doing an excellent job at keeping the site up and running; I’ve rarely seen it down.) And it’s obviously an honor to be invited to blog at scienceblogs.
I just wish whoever’s in charge of things over there would increase the visual variety a bit and cut down on whatever is killing load times (presumably, obnoxious ads are prime offenders).
I’ve been following the network neutrality debate with interest, largely through Tim’s excellent posts at the Technology Liberation Front.
Recently Ed Felten came out with a very good paper (pdf) on the subject, in which he comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do is wait on any legislation unless or until it becomes necessary.
There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing and letting the situation develop further. The present situation, with the network neutrality issue on the table in Washington but no rules yet adopted, is in many ways ideal. ISPs, knowing that discriminating now would make regulation seem more necessary, are on their best behavior; and with no rules yet adopted we don’t have to face the difficult issues of linedrawing and enforcement. Enacting strong regulation now would risk side-effects, and passing toothless regulation now would remove the threat of regulation. If it is possible to maintain the threat of regulation while leaving the issue unresolved, time will teach us more about what regulation, if any, is needed.
Bill Herman from Public Knowledge disagrees:
I dare say that current political theory demonstrates that his policy option is quite unrealistic; the chance to act will expire too quickly, and the threat of regulation will have passed.
(He has a fairly lengthy and thoughtful explanation following the brief part I quoted.) Tim Lee and Professor Felten maintain that there are several reasons to wait, each describing ways that passing legislation now could backfire.
It seems to me that there’s another reason there’s no harm in waiting: yes, as Herman says, the issue is currently in the public eye. But why? A few ill-advised comments from a telecom CEO and a bunch of wild speculation and exaggeration. It doesn’t appear that there have actually been any serious violations of network neutrality yet. (One dinky ISP in North Carolina blocked rival VoIP services, but the FCC stopped that with current regulations.)
So if the issue is this hot based only on a theoretical threat, I can only imagine that if ISPs actually started violating network neutrality principles, the grass roots would be even more outraged. There would be plenty of political will to enact regulations at that point, if necessary.
There are few things I hate more than web sites that move when I don’t tell them to.
My new favorite thing is the Firefox Flashblock extension. It replaces all Flash content with a blank box with a play button in the middle, so you can view the content only if you wish to. Meaning no more Flash ads flying over the text you’re trying to read. (I don’t block ads in general, since I want the sites I visit to make money, just ones that interfere with my use of the pages I’m trying to read.)
Hat tip to Radagast. (The ScienceBlogs tornado ad he mentions was the trigger of an polite but extremely angry email I wrote to their webmaster. Haven’t heard back, but the ad is gone at least.)
Tim is making quite the splash lately: his Cato Policy Analysis on the DMCA came out today. As Tim writes at TLF,
A lot of DMCA critics have focused on how DRM undermines fair use by narrowing the ways in which users can consume the content they have legally acquired. That’s certainly a valid argument, but I tried to focus on the implications of another type of fair use: the fair use right to use reverse engineering to build a competing product. Prior to the enactment of the DMCA, the courts had consistently turned back efforts by incumbents to use copyright law as a way to exclude competitors from their technology platforms. Most famously, IBM was not able to prevent the creation of IBM clones, because a company called Phoenix used “clean room” reverse engineering techniques to develop a compatible BIOS without directly copying any of IBM’s copyrighted software.The DMCA throws that principle out the window, because it makes it a crime to “circumvent” a DRM scheme—that is, access the content without first getting the permission of the DRM creator. As a result, it’s effectively illegal to build third-party software that interoperates with software like iTunes or Real’s video streaming software.
It’s an excellent, thought-provoking perspective, and sure to raise the blood pressure of anyone who cares about technology and fair competition.
(Of course, my link is just a drop in the bucket. Slashdot, BoingBoing, Instapundit, and Hit & Run are already on it.)