But, y’know, time heals all wounds. I am convinced that Twitter’s import as a cultural hub will decline. Twitter won’t go away entirely, mind you — it’s a genuine medium unto itself — but I think its true legacy is likely to be a frankly unbelievable extension, evolution and popularization of the capabilities represented by SMS. Multicast? Common use of symbolic delimiters like @ and #? Widespread institutional adoption? Two years ago, if you’d asked Verizon when SMS would be used this way, they’d have laughed in your face. Now the marketplace is going to demand this functionality — if not from Twitter, then from someone else.

But as I said, I think the conversations happening on Twitter will become less relevant, and the medium less vibrant. Actually, I’m beginning to think that this is an iron law of online mediums. This post (via Megan) helped focus my thinking a lot.

Here’s how it goes. First, a network achieves viability — enough people are using it to send non-”hello world” messages that the community can sustain itself. Next, users experiment, publishing and republishing content that they find compelling. The system amounts to a collaborative filter, and the quality and novelty of the results are surprisingly good. At this point people begin to notice and discuss the potential for the network to have greater relevance — and, inevitably, those who don’t understand that participation in the filtering activity is non-negotiable begin whining about taking the medium seriously when they see so much trivial content on it. Despite this carping, more users join the network and its value and potential importance begin to be more widely understood. At this point users change how they identify content worth publishing or republishing: rather than the first-order “how compelling is this?” they begin using the second-order “how compelling will other people find this?” Although they were excellent and determining what they thought was interesting and appropriate, they’re comparatively terrible at determining what other people will like. Quality declines (”I blogged: del.icio.us links for 2009-07-02″). Worse, as users continue to try to shirk their collaborative filtering responsibilities, experimental uses of the medium are discouraged or otherwise become less viable. The system ossifies, and soon enough everyone is sick of having to check Facebook. Time for a new no-pressure medium for goofing off with your early-adopter friends. Rinse, repeat.

I don’t want to oversell the preceding — I’m pretty sure that Clay Shirky accidentally scribbles more profound sociological observations about the internet during the course of searching for a working ballpoint pen at the bank. But this is my understanding of the situation, and by now I think we have enough data points to conclude that most, if not all online social networks achieve viability, blossom and stagnate (it may still be entirely possible to run a viable business during the stagnation phase, I should point out).

It’ll happen to Twitter, too — it is happening. So let’s start talking now about what conditions we should demand of the next medium-of-the-moment before we start moving our political institutions onto it. My suggestion for a place to start: open, free, and likely to remain so.

UPDATE: This is somewhat related — it’s an example of what I mean by people withdrawing from the collaborative filtering process.

TWO: Via Caralyn, Christopher Weingarten on the present and future fortunes of the music critic. Points for his entirely appropriate level of occupational hopelessness; deductions for failing to make much of a case for the professional music critic’s necessity. With modern publishing and search technologies, the too-many-voices argument becomes a difficult one to make, and, I think, a basically incoherent one when talking about something as inessential and universally accessible as pop music.

This isn’t something I’m happy about. I have friends who are great music critics, and I’d love for them to be able to support themselves by writing record reviews. But this is sort of like saying that I’d love to see the market compensate my friends for playing Halo with me. It’s clear that the costs associated with producing music criticism have fallen to the point where it’s essentially a leisure activity. In a perfect world, this would be great: the resources expended to produce music criticism could be reallocated to more productive ends, and we could still be assured a steady stream of deep thinking about music (now with less market distortion!). In practice, those resources are likely to wind up allocated less efficiently — say, put toward debt service on a loan that financed the unnecessary sale of an alt-weekly to a clueless owner who will preside over its demise. (Woo markets!)

But we’ll still have plenty of music criticism, and plenty of other good writing. I won’t say something pretentious about writers writing because of some irresistible artistic compulsion. But writers will keep writing because they think writing is fun, so they’ll do it when they can. And that’ll be enough for the rest of us, because these days much of the writing they do will inevitably be free, our supply unrestricted. Just look at The Awl, a site run by people who perfected the blogosphere, then watched it blossom, pullulate, and choke itself to death. Now they’re doing it all over again, because hell, it was pretty fun for a while there, wasn’t it?

I know, I know: they’re not allowed to sell my information. It’s probably just coincidence. I mean, malfeasance by the government or its agents? The very idea is ludicrous!

And yet I remain convinced by the experience. And so I understand where Michele is coming from. If they’re willing to sell my phone number, is it really so outlandish to think that the ACORN agents administering the census will be secretly sizing up respondent families’ fitness in order to facilitate the involuntary harvesting of organs (and their subsequent redistribution to welfare recipients) under the coming socialized medicine dystopia? Of course not. Stay strong, Michele.

It’s still not clear to me the extent to which technology is enabling intramural communication among the protesters, as opposed to simply serving as a broadcast medium between a few of them and the west. I’m very curious to find out, though, and have a few emails out to people running proxies asking how much activity they’re seeing from plausibly Iranian IPs. At least one has committed to figuring this out; we’ll see if he follows through.

One thing is increasingly clear: the idea that you can change the world from your computer has a strong allure. From the various alleged DoS attacks underway* to the wrangling over hashtags and profile data (based on what seems to be pretty tenuous speculation about the regime’s filtering plans and abilities), a lot of narcissism is masquerading as activism. But then, this is the internet.

* These seem virtually certain to be counterproductive — how exactly does damaging digital communication empower the side without the TV stations in an information war? How are targets even being identified, except via the diktat of trusted-but-unverified Twitter users?

UPDATE: Austin Heap, who seems to be running the biggest clearinghouse for #iranelection proxies, has written an update sharing some stats. He’s apparently filtering source IP (seemingly using this list) and reports 2000 connections/second. Modern browsers reuse connections for multiple HTTP requests, so that’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve asked him whether he’s comfortable generating some stats on where the outbound traffic is going.

WELL, HELL: If the professional diplomats at the State Department thinks that Twitter is vital resource for Iranian protesters, I suppose I can’t really argue otherwise. But it doesn’t make me any happier about a privately-owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. I should add that Twitter as a company has been nothing but praiseworthy, from how they rescheduled their downtime to the openness represented by their API. But there are limits to any for-profit enterprise’s goodwill. I would feel a lot more comfortable if #iranelection was occurring on a decentralized network (and yes, I realize there are immense technological hurdles to such a thing being practical).

I think there’s reason for skepticism about Ambinder’s claims. My understanding is that cell service has been disrupted in Tehran since Saturday evening, and that net access to Twitter from Iran is blocked, making it only possible to access the site through a shifting set of proxy servers — a task that requires both technical expertise and which is typically impractical to do on a mobile device. Ambinder’s vision of furtive Twitter revolutionaries users collaboratively helping one another dodge #machinegunnests seems like wishful thinking.

It does seem unquestionable that Twitter has enabled the coverage of the events in Iran to proceed with an immediacy that’s novel to the medium. Partly this is simply because Twitter is currently enjoying a lot of excitement and attention from journalists; partly it’s because the medium really does enable the centralized distribution of information on a time scale that was previously impractical.

But when all is said and done, the centralization means it’s still relatively brittle when faced with a government keen on blocking it. Again: how are Iranians supposed to have been using the service? Yes, clearly some are. But how many, really? While it’s been a fascinating way for all of us to learn what’s going on in Iran, I still doubt that enough people in Iran have access to the site for it to be significantly enabling or shaping events there. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.

This sounds like a pretty good idea, and very well may be. But it’s worth pointing out a couple of things: first, this may just be an apples and oranges sort of situation. It may not be the case that the sort of compensation structures available to a penniless startup are practically applicable to an enormous financial behemoth. I’m admittedly no expert, but I can imagine there may be problems.

Second — and this I can say with somewhat more confidence — the performance of the software industry is not such an inspirational success story that emulating it should be assumed to be a good idea. Spend three months reading TechCrunch or its equivalent; if you can make it through that time without killing yourself, you’ll realize that Silicon Valley is incredibly inefficient, wasting vast sums of money on overhyped ideas that are stupid, unnecessary or just commercially impractical. There are very, very few firms that have created genuinely original technologies — technologies that Harry Turtledove would like to write about, technologies that may conceivably never have been invented if their creators’ parents hadn’t met. The bulk of the industry is made up of the proverbial million monkeys sitting at a million MacBooks; occasionally some Javascript comes out.

Some friends of mine have created a fake web startup. On their homepage (or twitter feed) you can find a simple mad-lib that changes every time you reload the page, and which goes like this: “[VAGUE, POSITIVE GERUND] [TECHNOLOGY A] with [TECHNOLOGY B].” This really is how the industry operates: through the mind-numbing combinatorial exhaustion of whatever technologies Google, Amazon, Adobe, Sun and a very few brilliant open-source developers can come up with. Some of this is valuable, even necessary economic activity. But a lot of it is just speculative activity which benefits no one other than the people directly involved — and which is ultimately a waste of resources. This should sound wearyingly familiar by now.

Now, it’s not all their fault. The real problem is that software development is really easy — you need almost no capital, and there’s an incredible wealth of existing technology that can be utilized. The bottlenecks to innovative commercial activity in the software realm are frequently external. These limits can be technological but not software-related (phone cameras needed to get good enough to read barcodes), cultural (Facebook couldn’t exist until college students were wired enough to adopt it) or political (only a firm of Google’s size and import could start scanning books and comfortably expect to find a way out of the orphan works problem without being sued into oblivion). And of course it’s just generally tough to start a successful business (I think I can confidently say that the average internet startup is based on a somewhat stupider idea than the average non-internet startup, but I have no idea which is actually more likely to fail). I’m sympathetic to these guys: certainly, I can understand the impulse to paint yourself a visionary who creates fundamentally new possibilities, rather than as mere skilled craftsman using tools handed down from others.

But still, it’s hard to look at the amount of investor money wasted on the web industry and conclude that its compensation practices are ones that should be emulated — particularly given that those practices are being abandoned now that the accounting gimmick that enabled them has been ended. Maybe it’s preferable to have a lot of middle-class programmers blowing through investor money instead of a relatively few upper class finance executives doing the same — I suppose it is a more progressive transfer — but that’s all that Silicon Valley’s recent history seems to promise. The way to neutralize the villains of this bubble may not be to make them more like the villains of the last bubble.

So yes, it’s a bad situation, but a lack of ideas seems to be at least part of the problem. And then last night it struck me: a bold, novel solution, which I offer here in the humble spirit of citizenship.

We need more money flowing around, right? But we can’t just print more money because of the inflationary risk, right? It has to be short term — new money that disappears after a while. The answer is simple: chocolate gelt. Edible currency. Fiat finger food! It’ll circulate for a while, then gradually disappear as people consume it. For those of you who still believe in economics, I think the technical rationale is that the currency will be consumed once its marginal deliciousness (or whatever) exceeds its face value. Personally, I think it’ll probably just be consumed by the drunk, hungry or drunk & hungry. Either way, there’s a built-in safety check against long-term inflationary effects.

There are of course some practical concerns. The foil would have to be significantly upgraded to make regular handling of the currency viable — perhaps some sort of carefully engineered tin design would be necessary. Also, it may be that chocolate is too cheap (or melting-prone) a commodity to turn into a useful form of currency. Or perhaps forgers would refill empties with Hershey’s chocolate — presumably inferior to delicious federal chocolate. But there are solutions to these problems. Maybe we could use ampules of liquor. Or, simpler still, the government could storm Hidden Valley, seize its ranch-producing operations and make the Treasury Department the only source of our precious national condiment.

Whatever the specifics, I think this is an initiative that would be welcomed by the public. Certainly I’d be a lot happier about it than I was when I received five one-dollar coins’ worth of change from the Chinatown bus people last night.

Kottke’s analysis of the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov is the latest and most ludicrous example of our collective fascination with everything the Obama team does online. When placed on a webserver, a robots.txt file determines what sections of a website are ignored by search engines and other services that employ web crawling scripts. The Bush administration had a lengthy robots.txt file; the Obama administration does not. When someone bothers to point this out, they’re trying to imply that Obama will be less secretive than Bush. It’s a cute point to make, but c’mon — are we really supposed to believe that this means something? Does that mean, then, that the Obama administration’s ETag-enabled HTTP headers signal its commitment to energy conservation? Does the administration’s use of Microsoft IIS prove that the Obama campaign’s embrace of open source technologies was meaningless? No and no. It’s just a goddamn website. The president is obviously not involved in these sorts of mundane engineering decisions; but more broadly, it’s almost always a mistake to look for symbolism in such decisions.

Of course, I doubt that Kottke would claim to be making a serious point. In this regard, the online reaction to change.gov was much sillier. As that site launched and evolved, I saw a lot of folks expressing sentiments like this: “Look how high issue X has been voted on change.gov! In the age of the web, how long can politicians afford to ignore the will of the people?!”

When it comes to change.gov, the answer to this question is pretty clearly “indefinitely”. Seriously: does anyone really think something was accomplished by voting marijuana legalization into the third-most-popular spot? That lots of people would like to smoke weed legally and are willing to say so — so long as saying it costs them no time, money or liberty — that’s not exactly a direct-democratic revelation. Nor does it represent some sort of wisdom-of-crowds, well-informed policy prescription that deserves respect. I’m in favor of marijuana legalization, but the idea that the expression of this preference on change.gov is worthy of political attention is laughable.

Here’s the thing: the executive branch is pretty important, and it has been for a while. For this reason, various institutions supporting the interchange of information between the presidency and the public have evolved, from the White House Press Corps to the Gallup poll to, um, the legislative branch. This process actually works pretty well — it’s not as if the president finds himself scratching his head, saying, “Gosh, I wonder what would be popular with the public?” The additional information-lubrication that technology can bring to bear on this problem will offer very slight benefits.

Now of course, you can say that the will of the people isn’t sufficiently respected by our political institutions. But representing public opinion online isn’t going to make it magically attract any more official notice than it does in other formats. In fact, decreasing the cost of expressions of policy preference arguably serves to reduce the attention they receive. Consider how much value congressional offices place on phone calls versus paper mail or email. A hint: the harder and less form-letter-ready the medium, the more likely the staffer/glorified-CSR you deal with will be to make a tic mark on your behalf in the office tally for HR-whatever. How much attention do you think your opinion is going to garner when you give voice to it by clicking on an AJAX thumbs-up button? How much do you think it deserves?

I’ll go further: to whatever extent the Obama administration is paying attention to change.gov, they’re making a mistake. I mean, look, it’s a nice idea. But if it’s anything other than a cynical PR exercise, it’s also a basically undemocratic empowerment of a particular constituency on the basis of the arbitrary criterion of Web 2.0-iness — which is admittedly better than gender or skin color, but still. I thought this rankled when Comcast did it on Twitter, and I think it does here, too — although not as much, since the web is less of a niche forum than Twitter (and despite “what to do about Iraq?” probably being a more important question than “why aren’t my HD channels working?”).

The one genuinely noteworthy aspect of all this online business is the direct line of communication it provides from the president to the public. Again, the import of this has been overstated: for all of its shortcomings, in most cases the media’s coverage of the administration will be more useful to the public than the administration’s presentation of itself. In the same way that you might visit the Toyota website when shopping for a car but give greater consideration to more disinterested sources of information like Consumer Reports, there’s only so much attention that the public will — or should — pay to what the administration has to say for itself. The one big exception to this is the not-infrequent case where the media’s market-determined forms preclude the efficient communication of information to the public, as when a nuanced sentiment from a speech is reduced to a sound bite. The president’s online presence can offer a solution to this problem, achieving the (relatively few) advantages of a state media organ without any of the market- and opinion-distorting downsides.

But again: let’s not overstate things. It’s great that this capability exists; it’s great that whitehouse.gov has gotten a new coat of paint. But these capabilities have existed for a while now, and nobody’s given a shit. The president’s weekly radio address has been on iTunes since 2005 — how often have you found yourself listening to it at the gym? It’s naive to think that the internet is going to supplant all the existing ways we have for the government to listen to the public; and it’s silly to think that the public is going to remain keenly interested in what the government has to say just because Obama’s hired someone who knows CSS. This is all useful stuff, but it’s not going to revolutionize our society.

The web is great and I’m glad our institutions are getting online. And the internet is changing — and already has changed — politics. But the real revolution here lies in the ways that technology makes it easier for people to organize into groups — groups that can then make their members’ opinions heard through the traditional levers we have for affecting our government. Don’t let me dissuade anyone from signing the urgent online petitions in their inboxes. But — so far, at least — all of the online attempts to completely disintermediate our democracy have been hopeless — even when they haven’t also been hopelessly lame.

Here’s the story: DailyKos runs on a system called Scoop. It’s kind of a monstrosity, but large swaths of the netroots are used to it, terrified of change, and have consequently convinced themselves that the system they started using first happens to be technically superior to all the ones they encountered thereafter. This isn’t a novel delusion by any means; most of us do it all the time, myself included.

One developer decided there were some things he didn’t like about Scoop and elected to rewrite it in a different language. You can find the project announcement here, and it should immediately set off warning bells:

• There’s no indication that he’s envisioning his efforts as an open source project.
• He clearly hasn’t bothered to learn much about Scoop, given that he misidentifies the language it’s written in as PHP rather than Perl. If he’d opened a single source file, he could not have made this mistake.
• He said this:
  

  I am not a language snob. I know all languages have their place. And I see php as the language for a small to medium sized operation. Java is an Enterprise solution and a complete, robust language, capable of interacting with just about anything computer.
  
  
  If we want to take blogs to the next level, we have to take our blogging software to the next level.

  This is the kind of meaningless bullshit that salespeople say when they know nothing about anything except that they have something written in Java that they’d like to sell. Java’s great, it’s fine, but PHP powers sites like Digg and Facebook, so don’t tell me it can’t run your blog about Rhode Island politics. Perl, can, too — obviously it powers dKos and other Scoop sites, but it also manages to keep Slashdot afloat. It’s not the loveliest language around, and aside from Scoop and Movable Type, web development has pretty much moved on to faster and/or cleaner languages. But it can clearly get the job done.
  
  
  Also: “capable of interacting with just about anything computer”? What does that even mean?

• His email address is pacified69@yahoo.com. Come on.

Despite this, the sorry state of Scoop hosting and the netroot throngs in its thrall seem to have been enough to push jScoop to some success as a proprietary host for political communities. The hosted effort was branded as SoapBlox, it acquired a few machines, and it charged reasonable rates. Then it got hacked.

I haven’t seen the code; it’s not open source. And it’s been years since I wrote any Java, so I might not be able to make heads or tails of it even if I did see it. But my guess is that the author didn’t just reinvent the wheel in terms of Scoop, but also in terms of forms processing, sanitizing input, session handling and who knows what else. Some vulnerability was left exposed, and someone took advantage of it.

Hey, we all make mistakes. Bugs happen. But it’s our responsibility to make sure that our mistakes happen in places that are unlikely to lead to catastrophic problems. That means building on other people’s work. Googling for existing projects and reading old mailing list archives is less fun than firing up TextMate and starting to type, but you’ve just gotta grit your teeth and do it.

One of SoapBlox’s servers went offline, and the dev abruptly declared defeat. The users were understandably freaked out. Unfortunately, that’s leading them to make some bad judgments. Here, from a Kos diary entitled “Why SoapBlox Matters“:

SoapBlox includes all the major features of a community blog — namely, user diaries and other community-building features. These features are NOT readily available in any other software platform WordPress, MoveableType and others make it exceedingly difficult to do things like diaries and frontpage promotions, and SoapBlox makes it easy.

This just isn’t true. There are plenty of projects that can match the requirements of SoapBlox’s users. I’ve used Drupal a lot, and can say with confidence that it offers the diary, threaded-commenting, rating, voting and front-page-promotion features that seem to be at the heart of Scoop. And hey, this guy seems to like it. SoapBlox doesn’t matter because of its software; it matters because of the bloggers and diarists that use it. Writing blog software is much, much easier than running a successful online political community. There’s plenty of software out there, and the SoapBlox community ought to set its priorities accordingly.

Right now parts of the netroots are rallying around SoapBlox, trying to get it back online in a sustainable way. This speaks well of them, but it’s a mistake. This one-off of a project should never have been trusted with anything worth saving. Who knows what other exploits lurk in its codebase? Or what business problems might take it offline in the future? You can say that opensourcing the project will help resolve these problems, but that’s only true if you can also find developer manpower willing to continue reinventing this particular wheel. Frankly, you’re not going to find high-quality talent that’s willing to donate its time to a cause this pointless.

TechPresident suggests another path:

Options now for SoapBlox include [...] wrapping the platform into the services offered by one of the bigger progressive tech firms like Blue State Digital, EchoDitto, or Advomatic.

Speaking as a someone who until recently worked at EchoDitto, and whose boss is now one of Blue State’s founders, this is also a stupid idea. If one of these firms wants to do this work for free, then sure, the SoapBlox bloggers should jump at the chance. But hiring a consultancy is an option that’s vastly more expensive than what’s needed by these sites — sites which are, frankly, not particularly sophisticated from a technical or design perspective.

Here’s what I would suggest. First, make sure the SoapBlox admin is content to keep the sites up, at least temporarily. Second, find a college-age technical wunderkind who’s interested in politics and willing to work for cheap. These guys are a dime a dozen — I used to be one myself. Third, convince him to write an exporter for the SoapBlox data that puts it in a standardized format. Hooking into this project (found via al3x) might not be a bad idea. Getting the data into a portable form is the priority.

Then, find someone at a consultancy like one of the aforementioned ones who’s willing to help you figure out your requirements and specifications for a new suite of software. The simplest, best option is probably to just run Scoop. It’s what you want anyway; might as well stop nosing around it. I’m not intimately familiar with Scoop, but a quick look at its installation procedure makes it look like the complexity of installing and running it has been vastly overstated. If you don’t do that (or just want to help get the netroots off Scoop — a noble cause), then I’d suggest a hard look at Drupal and maybe Wordpress MU, or maybe Slashcode if for some reason you want to head toward Perl-land. You may have to get someone to develop a custom module or two to make the solution maximally Scoop-y, and you’ll certainly need someone who knows their way around the system to help configure it.

But given where the aesthetic bar has been set, this is not a particularly tough problem, and it shouldn’t cost that much money. If this community can afford to send people to Netroots Nation or the DNC, it can surely afford a minor investment in its critical infrastructure. Oh, and one more thing: when users inevitably raise a hue and a cry because the order of links on the sidebar has changed, or because they have to reconfirm their email address, or because of some other stupid thing, you should ignore them. They just want attention. Learning new systems and habits is a pain, but not nearly so painful as continuing to limp along in a system that never should have been used in the first place.