The challenge of the "flamers"

“Talking about my outliner, Windows, editing in the browser, how to do format and protocol work.”

Dave discusses his work on an outliner software project that he has been procrastinating on for over a month. He is hesitant to release it because he is worried about users not liking it and giving him a lot of criticism. However, he believes that even if some users dislike the software, it will still make the world a better place overall by adding new ideas and functionality. The software will initially only be available on Windows due to its use of the MDI window feature. Winer sees this as an opportunity to project a built-in web browser onto the window, allowing for seamless editing of local and web-based content. He hopes to attract software engineering and usability experts to help refine the editing experience before releasing the software. Winer also reflects on the challenges of getting feedback and dealing with “flamers” when releasing new ideas publicly.

Good morning everybody this is Dave Winer and this is a brief I think morning coffee notes for Saturday May 21st 2005. This morning I decided to do some work on the Outliner and this is something that I’ve been like really procrastinating on and the last time I worked on it believe it or not was April 18th and it’s now like over a month ago just I guess a lot of things sort of happened I got a cold and I went to New York every time I take a trip that like blows up any you know like forward motion that I ’ve got in programming and so I don’t know. So I did a warm-up project the other day and got warmed up on programming and then this morning I’ve got an idea and I said okay I’m just gonna like lead myself through this whatever blocks I’ve got here I’m going to just like get right through it and go start doing some programming and and what I found was that the reason why I was holding back was that I’m really scared about you know users seeing this software and and not liking it and then giving me a lot of crap about it and me not liking that either and I guess I’m just gonna have to cross that bridge when I come to it or do enough work on it so that it’s not likely to happen and so that the right people look at it and when they take a look they’re happy with what they see and they’re productive and they get work done and and that you know that it grows in a way that is manageable and you know I can see a lot of people being upset about this and it’s really funny because you know right now like nobody’s upset about it and you know think about the math of this so you do a bunch of work and you release something and by the way it’ll be free you release something for free and you add software to the world and ideas to the world and you know and some people don’t like it and some people do but the net net is you get mostly you get grief and I guess this is just the way it is people could like to complain and and I think the key thing is to not like take that hard that you know to be aware that you know you’ve done something it isn’t perfect but it’s it it does net net make the world a better place I think it does so you may not agree and and that’s okay so you know one of the caveats is well it uses a feature that’s only available on Windows and therefore the software at least at first will only be available on Windows and that feature is the MDI window which I don’t even remember what it’s called what it stands for basically on on Windows the frontier radio of course are built out of the same kernel the kernel of the two programs is identical and they differ in terms of what the what the object database contains in the shipping version otherwise there’s absolutely no difference between the two they compile there are actually sorry there are minor there is a minor difference or two and those are basically in terms of some flags that are set that allow the program to configure the database the object database application to configure itself so it basically you know tells you what what what platform you’re running on whether it’s Windows or Mac what the operating system is I think it says how much I don’t think it actually does say how much memory there is and that’s a table called system died environment and that’s the difference okay all the differences are encapsulated right there and so I’m using the MDI window is like one big window that encl oses all of the windows that the application opens and it’s either seen as a it’s usually seen as a negative I mean some people liked it Bob Bierman who who worked on the port of frontier from the Mac to Windows in 1997 and 98 he liked the MDI window or I don’t know or maybe he didn’t know how to program it in a way so that you couldn’t not like the MDI window no matter what we got the MDI window and I for the most part I would prefer not to have it but once we had it I got an idea that actually has turned out to be pretty useful which is why don’t we like project the built-in windows HTML control onto that window so that basically all of the sub windows of frontier appear to be opening up in front of the web and and and that really changes the way things look in other words you now have a web browser if you never opened a window basically inside of the kernel then it would be a web browser and it would be a web browser where you could edit the menus using and editing the menu is probably that big a deal for people it is for programmer though that the way the editor works in the kernel the menu editor it’s an outliner and it’s like the easiest menu editor but you know that wouldn’t be a reason to work in the environment I mean but what what turns out is a worth worthy reason to work in the environment is that when you think of it as an outliner then you can open up windows within the web browser that allow you to edit content which is then both local and over the internet seamlessly and that turns out to be a big deal because in all my work on content management over the years the one thing the constant I want to say constant fight but in a way you’re it’s not because it’s a creative process it’s not really a fight it’s like the key to good content management easy easy to use content management is to reduce the distance between the work you ’re doing on your local computer and the view of that that same content to the public on the public web and that’s why blog ging was such a big hit and that ’s why blogging is so easy relative to the previous forms of content management because it made the distance like zero basically because you did all of your work within the context of the browser and the browser is by definition like on the internet and so but you gave something up in the process and the thing you gave up is the high fidelity of an editor that runs on your laptop or your desktop and you’re basically wasting a lot of the capabilities of that local computer and and in but you gain what you lose in in fidelity in you know power you get back in terms of ease of use and a simple conceptual model that’s why you get the ease of use is because you can have things like an edit this page button which makes changing content three steps you click edit this page you see something wrong on the page that doesn’t count as a step you know you get the impulse I want to fix that because there’s a spelling error or I can see a better way to word this so you look around for the edit this page button once you spot it you click it it opens up a form there’s the text of the page you make your change that’s step two make a change you click submit that’s step three and boom you’re done it’s a three-step process edit this page make the change hit submit it doesn’t get much easier well it does actually you can get it down to one step and that one step is see the mistake actually let’s say two steps okay see the mistake that of course never counts as a step because you’ll you’ll take that that’ll happen no matter what you do okay you see the mistake you bring the window to the front the window that contains that content you make the change well here we go three steps make the change and you get saved but the next change is two steps okay the next step is you make the change and you get saved you can do that or get this you can make five well you can do this in the web browser way - you can make five changes and hit save but what what’s cool about this is that you have now gotten into the conceptual model of using a word processor or a spreadsheet some productivity application that and you know the funny thing about it is we’re now what 10 years into the web and seven eight years into blogging and there probably are people in the world now who started to use computers since that well probably of course there are there are millions of them there may be more people who started to use the web since the web started to use personal computers since the web since then there were before in fact that’s a certainty now the question is how many of those people have ever used a word processor maybe there are quite a few of them who never have because what they do is they view the web as the thin client that the computer industry was talking about in 1998 99 and 2000 the thin client that never materialized or the thin client that became Windows or that Windows became which by the way in a slight digression is why Microsoft’s in some deep shit because Microsoft took their eye off the browser they said well we defeated Netscape and therefore we don’t need to do anything more here we’ll go back to the business as usual prior to the web we’ll pretend the web never happened just leave the web alone we’ll just keep dominating with IE and it’ll never be a problem again and it will because people aren’t aren ’t flocking in droves I don’t know they probably have a better idea than I do they have certainly a much better numbers all I have is like my intuition and but the question would be is how many people of the new people in the last five years new personal computer users how many of them use word processor how many of them know that editing can be better than what you get in the browser which is by the way one of the reasons why I’ve been like really repeatedly saying you know the thing the low-hanging fruit in the browser space for Microsoft and for Firefox and for Safari I guess those are the three big browsers opera is there of course and although I think it’s getting late for opera that in retrospect the the way to win the hearts and minds of users in my humble opinion is to invest in editing to make editing a much better experience kind of like the way when Google before Google existed all the portal guys were saying hey you know search doesn’t matter our users really don’t care about that much of course they were wrong and you know you could say the kind of the same thing well you know editing just isn ’t really that important our users don’t care that much about editing why would you conclude that well because we have been giving them crap editing and they haven’t been complaining about it okay you might conclude it for that reason right but think about this they might not know that it can be better right and they may or they may have a feeling that it can be better but their techie friends are telling them it can ’t be better or they just never bring it up because they don’t think in terms of new features for software they just sort of accept what’s given them because that’s just kind of the way the world works you know but the opportunity is there and on the last to make editing much better so pop back to where I was before that is exactly what my piece of software proposes to do and when you boot it up it feels more like a browser I hope than it feels like an outliner or more and an outliner of course is just a text editor with the specific set of assumptions about data it says the data is organisable it’s structurable you can edit the structure it’s kind of like text on rails which by the way I was saying before Ruby on Rails came around which is I don’t even really know what Ruby on Rails is except it’s a programming language based on Ruby and but you know you can find references I think probably references where back to the 80 s where I was explaining outliners as text on rails and that you know basically you know what does it mean to be on rails it means that moving things around is easier than it would be that if you had to like like like a you know use a shovel and pail to pick up a pile of sand and move it you know a hundred miles away if you had to go a hundred miles for each you know you didn’t have a rail car well you know if you do have a rail car you could load up the rail car with sand and then take the whole rail car down on rails down to wherever you need to take it and if you don’t have the rails you have to do everything once you know one pail load at a time which is what word processors kind of do and you know if word processors are lugubrious and slow then web browsers are horrible I mean you know the problem with web browsers is that making changes is a very frightening process because there are so many ways to lose all of your work you know it’s totally not error error proof nobody ever did a user focus group or you know user research or usability testing on editing in a browser because I know nobody did because there were just there’s just so many ways to make it better with very very very little work you know and by the way to the web browser guys the reason to do this is that you know if you it ’s the old trick if you can get the programmers to use your platform the users will follow because the programmers will make that software work really great on that platform because that’s the platform they use in other words it’s a little bit of a trick it’s a bit of a fin esse it’s but it’s a finesse that works and something to think about so the editor that I work on has it has in the chrome of the browser a very good understanding of the content that it’s dealing with so it knows where its files are so it presents them to you in a pop-up menu so they’re easy to open it also knows what domains they’ve been mapped to and it’s very very easy to say take this outline and give it a short name like like Dave dot opml dot org or George dot world outline dot com or any one of a number of different domains in fact you can even point your own domains at it and the back end is also going to be available as something that you can deploy on your server and that’s just the beginning because I want to make a very good nice little blogging shelf for this so that it’s very easy for you to edit a blog in an outliner and I mean really easy easy easy is going to be the focus of everything in this it’s going to be iterate until it’s really really easy I may release before it is but I ’m going to really try to get the people to use it to be people who have a sense of software engineering especially usability engineering so that we can talk about that now it’s going to be hard to get people to get that okay there really aren’t that many people around that that believe that do that kind of work but would be wonderful it would be wonderful to be able to stage the release so that it comes up on their radar sooner rather than later which is kind of what I’m hoping to do by starting to talk about this stuff in podcasts try to attract those people before doing a release so anyway I seem to be podcasting a lot lately like almost every day sometimes two times a day I wonder how many people are able to keep up with it or want to keep up with it but I am getting some good email from people and so I get a sense that that these podcasts are reaching at least some of the kinds of people that I’m hoping to reach maybe one percent of the people who read scripting news are keeping current on this and and maybe that’s okay because because maybe it’s the 1% that are sort of really like paying close attention and are really interested and I and I also get that some of the old names of people old people old people you’re not old people but if you know I mean people that used to comment on my blog in like 98 99 I’m hearing from them now and I and I really like that because you know that kind of because hey those were the good old days right that was before this stuff was you know before everybody was using it and when you had to be pretty special to sort of find it and those pretty special people are you know pretty special sorry so anyway I guess we’re gonna settle let’s see we’re 19 minutes these things get shorter because you know we used to do the 40-minute podcast used to be like the ideal length and now the 30- minute podcast seems to be what we’re doing and Lordy Lordy Lordy this one looks like it’s gonna be it’s gonna be 20 minutes I don’t want to say one thing I put up a site the I guess what I want to say is that I have been sort of talking with people at big companies a lot lately and you know I said to one of them I really ought to have my head examined for doing this because you know and they’re nice people I think basically nice people you know certainly not bad people you know but but we come from such different worlds and and they ’re trying to work in the world that I’m really comfortable in that I’ve been spending many years not just like grooming the world to be comfortable for me but also having the rough edges on myself sanded down to the point where you know I don’t really mind the flame in fact it’s gone way beyond that it’s gone to the point where I’m trying to engineer the flames and it’s one of the facts of life is that when you when you enter this space you’re going to be surrounded by flamers it’s just that’s just inevitable and it’s not a bad sign because it means that you’re connecting it means that there they’re not the ones necessarily that you need to connect with but they’re an indicator that there are a lot more people that are listening to you now than were listening to you before they do it is kind of a shame in the first few years you’re coming to grips with this you you feel really frustrated that these people drown out the other people who don’t flame because once the flamers show up you don’t hear from the people who don’t flame very much they tend to fade fade away when the flamers take over that doesn’t mean they’re not listening okay that’s something I’ve learned because because you do hear from them you know it’s not you don ’t hear from the same numbers that you used to before the flamers dominated everything but but you do hear from them and there they are there I know because I see people you know if private gatherings or conferences or whatever and I’m surprised to find out that they are very much up to date with what’s going on and with me and and and I go well geez it’s really funny because I just thought you weren’t paying attention anymore and they say no no I read your site every bit as much as I ever have to them it doesn’t seem unnatural to read the site and then not contribute not participate it doesn’t because the rules change when the flamers take over and it’s no longer satisfying for them and so if it’s not satisfying then they just do the obvious thing they stop doing it and it doesn’t mean that they stop reading and and so like I try to say that if flames aren’t something to my you know colleagues at the big companies that and the flames aren’t something to run away from or to avoid because the alternative to flame is to do everything in private okay and when you do everything in private you tend to to only do it with people who you like and the problem is the world and then you know it because there’s a difference between who you like and who likes you it’s also because who you like is also a subset of the people who you know okay you don’t really like people who you don’t know but that doesn’t mean number one that they can’t and won’t make a contribution okay and it also doesn’t mean that their opinion is unimportant and you know it may sound a little flaky okay you know their opinion is important and you know well a lot of you die but the point is is that if you don’t include them you’re taking a big chance that they ’ll never support the thing that you want them to support and that’s dead death that’s terrible when you don’t have a consensus on a format or protocol then you’re going to get forked you’re going to get another approach and it’s going to take root and you’re gonna have very likely not have neither one of them will become the juggernaut that would have happened had you been willing to endure a little bit of flaming in other words the fact that some people flame should not be a reason not to do it openly okay you should as soon as you start get getting this thought that well we ought to bring other people in because it’s important to figure find out what they think that’s the moment when you have to go public with it because otherwise you can play it out go down the forks in the road go down each of the branches of the tree if you want to think of it as a tree instead none of the other ones work and we’ve tried them all and when you this isn’t 1985 anymore you know in 1985 Apple computer for example could have a developer conference and all of the important developers would come and we would all sit there and listen and we would all be thinking while we’re listening of a lot of different things one of the things always we be thinking about is how is this screwing me and how threatened do I feel by this you know because you’re hearing about it at a fade-off company and you ’re wondering looking to the left and to the right which of my competitors already know about this and have already started working on it and in 86 and 87 and 88 all the way through the 90s this was like the disaster after disaster that happened sometimes you’d be sitting in the room and you were one of the guys who got briefed so you felt like okay I got an edge up here right but sometimes you weren’t sometimes you’d sit in the room and nobody got briefed like Gershwar on Sidhu’s presentations about Apple talk and talk about a men acing guy this guy could could make you so scared or IBM I remember their presentation of top view again I think I don’t know we all felt like we had been hurted into cattle cars to be taken away to a concentration camp you know nobody had any inside knowledge of what was going on there and they talked to us like we were you know history and we had absolutely nothing to do with their future but we do have to do with their past and you know and therefore that’s why they’re granting us an early look although really wasn ’t very early you know and in the end of course it didn’t matter because the soft because the cursor’s never on that approach it never works it never you can feel when you feel that fear okay that hey I got left out of this one I recommend take a deep breath and think about what I’m about to say it isn’t going to work take your deep breath let the fear dissip ate a little bit because that’s what happens when you take a deep breath all of a sudden you feel okay a little wave of relaxation now let me let me program you okay it isn’t going to work it isn’t going to work the only way it works is if you take the chance and you get vulnerable and you show your ideas to everybody at the same time now you can say I’m a big company we don’t do things like that and I can turn around and say okay you’re a big company and you don’t set standards you’re a big company and you’re not influential I can’t change the rule of gravity for you I can’t make it it isn’t going to be the way you think it’s going to be it isn’t going to be fair the way you think it should be fair you think the world should wait for you and it should come to a developer conference where everybody you know listens to what you want them to do and we all support you and everybody says my these people are smart and you feel very accomplished but that’s a fantasy and the world doesn’t work that way that just isn’t the way the world works you can have the most successful protocol or format and the world won’t credit you with having done it it just won ’t be that is a fantasy it’s a dream it’s also probably not even worth achieving because you know well it doesn’t matter it ain’t gonna happen I’ve probably had as much success as anybody has ever had doing this kind of stuff and believe me there’s no unanimous accolades available it just simply doesn ’t happen nor so if you want it to work you have to I’ve I’ve got a new term for this called a conversation starter not a proposal not a recommendation not a suggestion a conversation starter and which you hope happens with a conversation starter is well first of all you hope you didn’t make any gl aring errors and by calling it a conversation starter well people probably will still will flame you about your lack of you know why didn’t you check this out with people before you posted it is what they’re gonna say not realizing of course that had you done that then somebody else would have said how dare you do this without checking with everybody don’t you understand how open things work well so you hope that you didn’t make any major mistakes when you designed your little thing right but if you did what you want to do is do that breath thing again and just fix it and right and you just keep fixing it until you feel that this thing is gonna work all the time you’re deploying all the time but you’re deploying with a caveat that I’m not deploying okay you you do test example you do test cases you try the ideas out you put them into practice and you see if it works and you do this really quickly with a laser- like focus okay and then before you get overwhelmed before you get overwhelmed with objections and other ways to do it whatever you look for what they call in the IETF world you look for what they call a rough consensus in other words can you convince two or three other people that this is a really good way to go and if you can you got it okay and you go you don’t wait for perfection I’ve talked about this earlier in other morning coffee notes is that you had to go with a credo that ’s probably not right but you go with a philosophical principle that I ’m always looking for the worst possible name so that means nobody can argue that that was the stupid name that you should pick a better name for this thing go with the worst one you know course is a little bit of a joke you’re not really going for the worst one but you know certainly not trying to find the best one and you go quickly and the only way to go quickly is openly so that’s what I can’t like put names on all these there are certainly quite a few of these kinds of conversations I’m involved with right now the syndicate conference was a really open good example of of this process and work IDG is a big company and I will always talk about my presentations on the web before I give them it’s a good thing to do because first of all it’s going to be public so wise will be public right from the beginning got nothing to lose there and I throw ideas out there and I do that you know I I do throw the ideas out that occur to me if I find it funny or interesting I throw them out I just say fine here this is the idea what do you think okay and that doesn’t mean I do every one of them I don’t if there are good reasons not to do them I don’t do them okay but a company like ID G is very uncomfortable with us again I did it in the open I didn’t do it in private their concern was well you can’t do this in the open and I said yeah I always do do it in the open they said we can’t do it with us in the open I said I don’t care who are you this is about syndication this is your newcomer here you ’re not you don’t make the rules so I said you don’t know me and they said that’s true and although by the way they do the guy who runs this branch of IDG we used to be the publisher of Mac world and he does know me and I know him and I think that he should know from that experience that I’m not a person who takes my integrity lightly but yet that ’s exactly what they thought where that’s at least how they acted their actions were basically that you know you can’t trust them and yet they trusted a lot of other people which really really hurts actually anyway so that’s kind of a mini example of that you know I wanted to do it openly a big company that had never done it that way before is new to blogging really uncomfortable with it fired me because I did that but the conference was better for it I’m sure it was better for it same things going on all the time so anyway so let’s see how far have we gotten no 33 minutes so we are within striking distance of the 30- minute goal and we’re not going all the way to 40 so anyway morning coffee notes this is May 21st 2005 Dave Winer and hey have a great day have a great weekend have a great life okay bye [BLANK_AUDIO]