Aaron Huslage

I’m getting sick and tired of everyone knowing how to “fix” Twitter. There is little use for this speculation. They don’t need help, but they do need time and space to do what they need to do. The general health of a service has little, if anything, to do with input from users. The fact is that no one knows what the problems are outside of the company and no one will know them unless they get a job there. The site goes down and the world blogs about it, tweets about it, screams about it in podcasts and no one cares. Even Techmeme put a one-word post from the intrepid Michael Arrington that said “Twitter!” on their front page.

The latest of these “thought leaders” happens to be someone named Nick Halsted. On his blog, he outlines an overly complex, ill advised strategy to fix Twitter. Please note that if your “system” involves a graph that looks like this, you are probably doing something wrong:

People who live in glass houses…

Stop talking about it and go do some work, for heaven’s sake.

I wrote this as a comment to Nick O’Neill’s excellent post on the ridiculousness of the recent Gillmor Gang podcast on “Data Portability” between some of the Internet’s most vocal folks:

This is a discussion about protocols. The only difference between talking about “data portability” and email is that SMTP was designed by some geeks in a back room and this one is being designed by some geeks with loud mouths.

The truth of the matter is that they want this “ecosystem” to thrive outside of just Facebook, et al. They want social networking features everywhere because they think that it will make money. But it is truly only an echo chamber thusfar and the users just don’t care.

The fact still remains that no one has yet made a dime on any of this except the founders of these companies and they aren’t likely to any time soon. Protocols are all nice, but until there is a true financial incentive for companies to implement them they are only specifications.

Moreover this discussion is as much about egos as anything. The “Gillmor Gang” is only the tip of the iceberg of folks that think their opinion actually matters. It mostly doesn’t. The “rank and file” users of these services plain don’t care if they can sync Facebook, Myspace and Bebo or even use their profiles off-site. So this is, in my opinion, a bunch of self-important folks talking about nonsense in their ever-expanding fight to remain (become?) relevant.

The Internet is so much more than the sum of its parts or the protocols that it is based on. It is itself a community tool and has been since its inception. This seems to have been forgotten by these folks.

This is a great day for homosexual couples in California. The rule of law has prevailed and freedom for homosexuals is now guaranteed in that state as the Supreme Court overturned laws against Gay Marriage. But this is not why I want to write tonight.

The argument against the ruling by groups like the Family Research Council and others mindlessly twist the facts and take advantage of people who only partially pay attention to this issue. They assume that if you are prone to disagree with Gay Marriage that you will agree with them and don’t really give people all of the right information, or even allow them to intelligently consider the issue. In their press release, the FRC’s President Tony Perkins said the following:

“The California Supreme Court has taken a jackhammer to the democratic process, and the right of the people to affect change in public policy. Four judges discarded the votes of 4,618,673 Californians who approved the state’s ‘Defense of Marriage Act.’ Voters understand that children should not be deprived of a mother or a father.”

This is patently absurd on the face of it. The Supreme Courts of this country exist not to forward the will of the people. They are meant to be independent of the opinions of the populace. In this instance the court in California decided to overturn laws voted on by the people as unconstitutional. They did not say “the people were wrong”, but they said “the people are not lawyers”. This does not constitute a “change in public policy” as Mr Perkins says, but is an enforcement of existing public policy. The courts rarely, if ever, take an activist stance for the sole purpose of activism.

Law is difficult and nuanced. There is a reason that people go to school for many years and study as much as doctors to get Law degrees. These judges are some of the most seasoned lawyers in our country. To dismiss them out of hand demeans their status and their knowledge of the law in the favor of cynicism and sound-bites. This is irresponsible at best and reprehensible at worst.

I’m in no way saying that the opponents of this ruling don’t have a right to complain. They do. They should, however, take into account the institutions of this country and the intelligence of those that would hear them. Groups like the FRC claim to support families, but this sort of action only teaches children to blindly absorb what they hear and not think for themselves. Instead they should form an argument based on the facts as they see them instead of mindlessly attacking the court.

I’m here at the Pangea Day screening at MSStudios’ Studio C. We’re awaiting the start of the event. The folks in LA just recorded the intro for the one-hour summary show and the set looks AMAZING. I’ll be updating this post periodically with my thoughts about the event.

If you aren’t at a screening, I hope that you will check out the streaming feeds on pangeaday.org and get around the “global campfire”

[11:06AM PDT]

It amazes me that this whole thing came out of a TED talk. The cynicism of the world, especially my little geek world, forgets the power of people so often. This event will no doubt be panned by skeptics and cynics alike, but the importance of things like this should not be questioned.

[12:00PM PDT]

The first hour of the show was absolutely stunning. The organizers of this event have done an amazing job finding films that really do get to the heart of the human spirit. From Carl Sagan’s wonderful story “Pale Blue Dot” to a film about soccer balls made from condoms. They have focused on “human universals” — emotions that we all share the world around like Love, Hope and Sorrow. Helping regain perspective and see the world as it is.

[1:00PM PDT]

This hour was much more intense. It started with a montage of people all over the world talking about their dreams and was followed by Gilberto Gil singing. After that, things were about identification of differences and why we might open our minds to ignoring differences.

Then we saw an amazing film from a soldier who simply told a story about a car accident in Iraq. It was simply a sequence of renactment photos with his voice, but the power of his words was unquestionable. We are all capable of feeling for those that we imagine are our enemies. We are all the same and there are no “accidents” in war.