Hey everybody, it's Dave Winer here and I was just reading an article on GigaOm by Matthew Ingram and he said there's a little bit of confusion about what this @Anywhere thing is that Twitter announced yesterday. I'm not sure that In gram is really confused. It was a pretty botched announcement. But I can explain what it is and maybe even provide a little
context on it. It's in the answer to something that Facebook has been doing and it 's also another one of these sort of salvos in what you might call the identity wars. It's basically you've got a lot of different competing identity systems on the net these days. Always have had a bunch of them. Gmail is an identity system. Or Google's login is an identity system.
They played a bit of identity system warfare with the whole Google Buzz thing and connecting it up with Gmail saying well we 've got a lot of users here. Why don't we turn them all into users of a new social network, community discussion thing. It didn't go over very So think of that, all of these well. things as sort of repurposing identity, trying to get people to think of their identity with one company as being more than just an identity with that
company. So on Facebook it has you can use your Facebook login Facebook, I think it's called Facebook Connect where to blog and stuff like that so you can comment there without having to create another username and password. Kind of pointless actually because well maybe not pointless because all the comments that you leave are then part of the comments stream that your updates, your status stream, or whatever you call it
over Facebook. So there's a bit of integration there that little maybe people like. I've got a big Facebook user so to me it doesn't mean a whole lot. So what Twitter noticed presumably is that they've got a lot of reporters that use Twitter and it's true, they do. And so if you notice that when you go to read an article on The New York Times or The Huff ington Post or any number of different places that they provide a way to contact the author of the
article. So what they're saying here is well, and they want to give you the email address would be sort of like the default way to contact the author. And they're saying basically well your Twitter ID is pretty important too and so why don't we just make it easy for these publications to link from the author of the article to their Twitter
identity. And so that when you hover over their name you get the same pop-up that you get over on Twitter which honestly I didn't think was all that innovative. Frankly I think it took features out of Twitter. In fact in a piece I wrote yesterday I even think in some ways that it broke Twitter because clicking on a user's name in Twitter actually got you some
important stuff. You might argue well the number of followers that is so important and the number of people that they follow. Okay, well it is kind of important actually. But I can understand them wanting to de- emphasize that and certainly the pop-up does do that. But it also makes it very difficult I've found at least using Firefox to find the tweet stream from that author. And with 140 character people tend to connect their messages messages. The last message is
an extension or an end. It assumes that you've read the previous one and there is so much confusion when you do that. It's bad enough that people don't click on it. Now they'll never get there. So you end up having to repeat yourself, that's one choice, or just never stringing things together. So forget about ever explaining anything that might require a little bit more than 140 characters. That becomes more and more unlikely over
time. So I guess the question is, is the Twitter identity really the important information about an author? I don't think it really is. And I think that the owners of these sites will not simply link to the Twitter identity. They'll probably include that amongst the many different ways of accessing an author of an article. So is it a big deal? Sure. If you're following the vendor sports and you're interested in who's kicking who's ass over there in Silicon Valley, yeah. In
that context it's important. It 's also more an example of really how convoluted this whole mess is. You've got these companies, technology companies out there getting more and more inside, insidious, you know, means like getting inside of something, getting into places they really don't belong. I where mean, why does Twitter belong on Huffington Post? I don't get it. I mean, do they really
think that goes anywhere? I mean, you know, in their boardrooms over Twitter, in the boardroom of Twitter when they have the discussion about this, they're thinking long- term multi-step strategy they want to sort of extend their reach out further and further and further. But, you know, there's another school of that says, we'll look back on thought this as being ridiculous five
years from now. It will be long forgotten, only mentioned in the context of some other me galomaniac, you know, some technology company. I don't think this is one we need to worry about, in other words.
But if you're a worrying sort of person and you're in the media, this is another reason to think about maybe you want to get your own real-time news system out there or work with some of your competitors to get one out there because the tech industry is really so many days you're going to figure this out. There are ways to do this, but they're trying to do that. We'll work. And this, I don't think is one of them. But anyway, those are my thoughts about at anywhere.
Hope you're all having what is today. Great Tuesday. It's beautiful here in New York today. The rainy weather seems to finally be over. It's a sunny day. It's a little bit br isk outside. It's probably the high 40s, maybe low 50s right now. It's going to head up toward 60 later today. So, I think you can fairly say spring is here on the east coast. And hope you're having a great Tuesday. See you all Thank you.