Archive for kicking baby squirrels

end times

September 28, 2010 at 12:25 am · Filed under bubble, kicking baby squirrels, speculation, wank

And it becomes clear why it was suddenly a matter of urgency to get the wordpress trademark out of Automattic’s hands, not to mention their newfound love for Internet Explorer. (IE? seriously? I remember when promoting open-source browsers was a core feature. I guess it depends who’s paying.)

Strangely, my comment on the latter post congratulating them on officially having sold out failed to make it out of moderation. Am I not allowed to say this until they announce they’ve been acquired?

Still, being eaten by Microsoft is way more impressive than getting swallowed by some random ad company nobody’s heard of. I suppose this means the squirrels lost.

Comments (21)

assorted cheap shots at lj

January 9, 2009 at 11:37 pm · Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, global tags, kicking baby squirrels

You want to provide asylum for lj-ers? That’s beautiful, but be prepared for:

  1. complaints that they only get two icons
  2. outrage at the censoring of porn artistic work with adult content from global tags
  3. I have to PAY to have more than 35 people on my flist???!!!!1111!!!
  4. why does my picture of a nipple get rated X on Gravatar?

I think the corporate culture at wordpress.com is probably an even worse fit for your average LJ-er than Six Apart’s was; arbitrary suspensions are an everyday occurence, not a cause for scandal, and there’s more pressure to keep things PG purely because there are so many kids. I’ve had a couple of people on my flist attempt the switch to wordpress.com already, but they find there’s no community here and get tempted back to livejournal. I don’t know why there’s no sense of community here, since most of the architecture is in place. It’s an organic thing. It either happens or it doesn’t. And of course there’s always been this underlying sense that wordpress.com is a stepping stone to when you get your own real wordpress blog, and it’s hard to make people passionate about a site that they’re just passing through on their way to somewhere better.

I don’t write anything like as much about wordpress as I used to because I don’t care about it anymore. I don’t care about the new interface that will be gone the way of all the others come 3.0. I don’t care what struggling little minnows Automattic swallow on their way up, or what empty promises they made to tempt investors. I see the same old wars being fought over the GPL and I might still find them interesting if they were still about freedom and authority, but they’re not. They’re about money.

Comments (9)

jumping the snark

August 22, 2008 at 1:02 am · Filed under bubble, kicking baby squirrels, speculation, wank

I imagine Six Apart draw considerable comfort from the fact that the Matt/Lloyd tag team still considers them enough of a threat to attack them at every opportunity. Far worse to be Blogger, and too crap to be scary.

But then, Blogger’s not in direct competition. Blogger’s already been bought.

I imagine I am not the only person drawing amusement from the spectacle of Automattic and Six Apart scrapping it out to be perceived as the the most valuable acquisition. I know I shouldn’t laugh. Recessions are not funny. I suppose I’m laughing at the pretence that it’s about who makes the better software. That ceased to be the point a long time ago. And when it was the point, there was a lot less bitterness and fear floating round.

Goddamn credit crunch. You make the snark so much more serious.

Comments (8)

the mother of invention

July 28, 2008 at 3:14 am · Filed under dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, pointy-headed fanatics, wank

Lloyd is sad, because the cool kids at Six Apart and OpenID are having some sort of open-source standards-inventing party and Automattic weren’t invited.

Well, maybe they remembered Matt’s reluctance to support Atom 1.0? Or took note of his failure to provide any specs for the WXR export format and assumed he wouldn’t be interested in their venture? Just a thought.

I kind of love how the fanboys in that thread protest that it doesn’t need a spec because it was only ever intended to be used for ferrying content between WP installations anyway. (Who would ever deviate from the One True Path and switch to another application?) It reminds me a lot of how Matt refused for years to include any export features at all, because he thought it was the sole responsibility of whichever tool you were adopting to get your data out of his software and into theirs. Database dumps were considered a perfectly adequate form of export until wordpress.com arrived; if this place had never been invented, WXR would not exist. It’s not a standard. It’s a makeshift solution to the problem of shifting data from .com blogs to .org installs, and nobody at Automattic believes in it enough, or cares enough about data portability, to bother polishing or promoting it.

I have little doubt that the MT export format is technically inferior to WXR (I wouldn’t know, my head’s not that pointy yet), but it became a de facto standard because they documented it and encouraged people to use it. Back in the day, someone wrote a nifty little program to export Diaryland entries in MT format, and I used it to import a year’s worth of posts into WordPress. That didn’t benefit Six Apart directly, but it certainly benefited me. I think that’s probably what they mean by openness.

Comments (4)

bitchery in slugs

June 17, 2008 at 3:39 pm · Filed under Akismet, bubble, dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, speculation, wank

Isn’t it strange how when you write an article slagging off TypePad and praising WordPress you are inevitably ‘honest’ and ‘insightful’, ‘interesting’ and ‘eloquent’, and when somebody from Six Apart tries to make a counterargument they are ‘venomous’ and guilty of ‘falsehoods and misdirection’?

Sadly, my comment on Lloyd’s post is still languishing in moderation. I’m sure this is merely an oversight, since nobody would tell their readers ‘Please challenge me on my views!’ if they were going to censor dissenting comments. I’ll reproduce it here for now, and link to it when it’s published:

I don’t see that Anil’s any more abrasive in his defence than Matt is when people come out attacking WordPress. (That is, possibly a little too forthright, but hey, fanboys are annoying.)

For someone with ‘extensive experience of both platforms’, Michael seemed strangely confused about the distinction between wordpress.com and .org and TypePad and MT, attempting to draw direct comparisons between Automattic’s non-hosted software and Six Apart’s hosted service when it suited him, and switching back to comparing TypePad with wordpress.com when that fitted his argument better.

For example: he thinks TypePad makes it too difficult for people to add third-party widgets, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.com doesn’t let you add any third-party flash or javascript widgets at all. But he thinks it’s cool that wordpress.com won’t let you use Adsense, conveniently forgetting that wordpress.org has dozens of plugins which make it easy.

I’m afraid that by the point where he claimed the separation of WordPress and WordPress MU was ‘a different developmental strategy’ rather than a historical accident I’d lost all patience. WordPress MU isn’t a fork of WordPress; it’s a fellow fork of b2 that got swallowed up by its sibling. Incorporating multiblogs into core would have broken backward compatibility so much it was no longer an option. And it’s not for people who need to run a handful of blogs off a single installation, it’s a specialist tool for site admins who need a blogfarm. It would make more sense to assess it alongside the Livejournal open source code than to pit it against Movable Type. http://mu.wordpress.org makes this perfectly clear, but proselytising fanboys trying to push it as ‘the upgrade to the upgrade’ don’t do anyone any favours.

I left out how he’s praising the 2.5 interface when Matt has already pretty much acknowledged it was a failure. Or how he thinks monthly security upgrades are cool because they’re a ‘a testament to a vibrant developer community’, which comment alone constitutes the loopiest piece of fanboying since ‘the blogging market is c.l.o.s.e.d.’

But no. Mocking the fanboy is a cheap distraction. My point is how nasty things are getting now the market is contracting. I’m not talking about the consumer market so much; people are still starting new blogs, though in the current economic climate they’re going to be less willing to spend money on them and that’s not good for either company. I’m talking about getting more funding, or going public, or finding a parent company willing to take you under its wing and shield you from the hard times ahead. These things are not going to be as easy as they were a couple of years ago. You are competing for increasingly scarce resources. It’s easy to be nice to each other when things are going well, but these days it’s survival of the fittest, and the way these spats are conducted both sides seem about equally worried.

Which would be odd, if Six Apart really were the underdog; but they’ve stolen a march on Automattic by making their anti-spam service free to everyone. Short-term this shouldn’t make too much difference as most paid-up subscribers won’t be interested in switching till they’ve got their money’s worth, but long-term it threatens one of Automattic’s major revenue streams. That’s the real reason the gloves are off again.

And the accusations of being splog-ridden have evidently hit home because they’re, um, true. How could they not be? Akismet can’t hope to catch them all at sign-up and you’re relying wholly on volunteers to report the ones they happen to see. Plus, all reports have to be dealt with individually by support staff, who are generally sort of busy with support. At least they’ve blocked drmike’s wordpress.com account now so they won’t be getting any more of those pesky spam reports from him. That should help with the workload even if it doesn’t help with the splog situation.

Comments (26)

mentioned in dispatches

May 20, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under bubble, kicking baby squirrels, megalomania, wank

I have to admit, I’m a bit surprised — this conversation is about how all of us at Six Apart try to stay involved in the conversation, and with you being the lead developer responsible for meeting the needs of millions of WordPress users out there, your contribution is to pick at one ambiguous sentence in the middle of the article. I hope we can find more positive ways to help the community we both support.

Yup, I think we can safely say that Six Apart are still winning the snark wars.

Comments (7)

priorities

April 7, 2008 at 12:27 am · Filed under bubble, design, dot com, forums, global tags, kicking baby squirrels, monkeys saying BOO!, wank

In the course of breaking everything else, they accidentally fixed global tags again. Obviously Matt fixed it as soon as he found out, gaming Google being so much more important than letting people upload images or check their spelling.

I think they will lose a few people over this dashboard thing. 150-post threads where staff do not bother responding are never good. You’d think they’d have put someone on firefighting duty, publically addressing people’s concerns and giving some vague impression that they listen to their users, even if that isn’t actually true. Clearly we are going with the SUP school of community management (‘so what if a vocal minority of customers hate us? they can go cause trouble on someone else’s service’) rather than Six Apart’s (‘we’re so sorry we upset you! we love you! we’re listening! right up to the point we sell you out!’)

Fair enough. I mean, we all know they’re not going to listen to their users, so it would be disingenuous to pretend.

Comments (7)

paradoxes are fun

March 13, 2008 at 8:52 pm · Filed under Akismet, bananas, bubble, dot com, free beer fundamentalists, kicking baby squirrels, megalomania, wank

[This was going to be a comment on my last post, but it was getting so unwieldy I thought I’d promote it]

Well, Matt seems to have these brainstorms every so often. It tends to coincide with the party season. Or, apparently, major conferences. Hard to see what Toni and the Happiness Engineers (hey! they sound like a Fifties girl group!) could do about that, other than fit Matt’s laptop with some form of alarm that starts wailing and locks down the keyboard when he mentions validation, grammar, or his own general fantasticness for giving ‘his’ software away.

Also, not all the code on wordpress.com is GPL. Nor is all the code in Akismet. Six Apart understand better than anyone else that Automattic are a business, and that letting people have wp.com out of the box or disclosing Akismet’s inner workings to spammers would make no sense whatsoever. But it looks like you’re trying to hide the fact when you refuse to concede the truth of it. Owning up to closing some of your source for sound reasons is a lot more open and honest than encouraging the fanboys to believe that everything you do is 100% open when it’s not.

Paradoxes are fun. Embrace them.

The most interesting thing about this whole brouhaha is Matt’s overreaction. He clearly feels far more threatened by Six Apart than anyone would have suspected based on, well, the facts and figures; not to mention the psychological advantage of his current success being largely due to their earlier failure. They must be really happy. It would be very easy for them to spin this as Automattic falling apart in the face of a renewed challenge from an older company that has already made its mistakes and learned from them. Or as Matt being not quite ready for the cut and thrust of big business. I think drmike is probably right in saying that it’s Toni’s job to mentor Matt through this period and stop him getting wound up by the competition, but I’m not sure he actually has the authority to tell Matt not to do anything, CEO or no CEO.

In a year or two, people may look back on this spat, coinciding as it does with the delayed release of 2.5 and the brokenness of .com, and say it was the point that WordPress jumped the shark. Certainly I’d never seen so many discontented people on the .com forums before this week. No wonder Matt is freaking out.

Comments (7)

glass house

March 11, 2008 at 8:11 pm · Filed under design, kicking baby squirrels, wank

Baby squirrel lulz. To be honest, I still found MT slow last time I tested it, and I think the lack of one-click installs is really hurting them, and as a livejournaller I’m still sort of bitter about the gulag thing, but I do think Anil’s snark is of a whole different class to Matt’s lame cracks about validation errors.

If Matt cares so much about XHTML then maybe wordpress.com could quit stripping the slashes from the <br /> tags in my widgets (no, I don’t like sprinkling linebreaks everywhere either, but I kind of want the spacing on my sidebar not to be screwed up). Validation, like punctuation, is always a glass house in which it is inadvisable to cast the first stone.

Comments (16)

baby squirrels flee scary fangirls

December 3, 2007 at 8:49 pm · Filed under dot com, kicking baby squirrels, wank

Having plundered everything they could from its code and staff, Six Apart have offloaded the troublesome Livejournal onto some Russians. (The latest incident? Outrage over user flagging of mature content. You know, like wordpress.com has had for, like, ever.)

Let that be a warning to you, kiddies: whine too much and you’ll be sent to the gulag.

Yes, I can totally see why Six Apart felt the community was more trouble than it was worth, and it’s not like they were particularly commited to the site in the first place (I remember having to nag to get userpics accounted for in the Style Contest, which was really for MT/Typepad with LJ tagged on as an afterthought). But as an LJ user? Wow, I feel so unwanted. And, it goes without saying, I don’t trust SUP. I see even more ads and even less privacy in my LJ future.

Oh well, at least the guy who runs Insanejournal is happy. Every cloud…

Comments (8)

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