Winer Swings and Misses…Again

I’m bored, and the non-stop tor­rent of Apple Unicorn rumor-mongering inter­ests me not one bit; so I think I take some time to point out yet another exam­ple of Dave Winer’s ongo­ing cam­paign to prove that he knows fuck-all about tech­nol­ogy. I’ve writ­ten about this before, but this exam­ple was too good to pass up.

In an arti­cle titled Twitter is SMS 2.0 Dave puts forth the the­sis that Twitter is to SMS as blog­ging is to the web. Hilariously, that anal­ogy is absolutely cor­rect, but not in the way that Dave thinks it is. Dave is propos­ing that Twitter is an evo­lu­tion of or replace­ment to SMS in the same way that blog­ging is an evo­lu­tion of or replace­ment to the web. To quote the curmudgeon:

There was the web and then there was Web 2.0. The dif­fer­ence is dimen­sion. The first ver­sion of the web, though it was never the inten­tion of the designer, was one-way. Publishing was hard, very few peo­ple did it. Lots of read­ing, not much writ­ing. Blogging changed all that, writ­ing got very easy, then richer, to the point where lots of pro­fes­sional pub­li­ca­tions now use blog­ging soft­ware. Mission accomplished.

The first mis­take that Dave makes is the clas­sic New Media Douchebag divi­sion of “Web” and “Web 2.0.” I hate to tell you lack-wits, that divi­sion exists solely in the minds of you and your fel­low trav­el­ers. To every­one else on the planet there is and always has been just “the web.” Hells, most real peo­ple don’t even under­stand that there is a dif­fer­ence between “the web” and email.

The sec­ond place that Dave jumps the tracks is his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of blog­ging and that it has some­how changed the land­scape of the web. The truth is, and Dave should fuck­ing well know this, is that “blogs” existed even before hyper­text trans­fer pro­to­col was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. The sep­a­ra­tion of “blog­ging” into some novel cat­e­gory is again an inven­tion of the New Media Douchebags.

Dave’s final mis­take is his impli­ca­tion that the fact that “lots of pub­li­ca­tions” use blog­ging soft­ware mean that blog­ging has some­how replaced the web. This is a clas­sic Winer mis­take, con­fus­ing the mes­sage with the medium. What does it mat­ter is a news out­let is using an in-house Content Management System (CMS), a blog­ging plat­form, or hand-coding each html page? It’s the con­tent that mat­ters. Just because the New Media Douchebags have decreed that sequen­tially posted “arti­cles” are the def­i­n­i­tion of “blog­ging” doesn’t change the fact that the con­tent, in the case of our news out­let exam­ple, is a news report. If CNN starts carv­ing their head­lines into stone tablets, does that make them commandments?

Moving on with Dave’s argument:

Texting was always a read-write medium, and very sim­ple, but like 1.0 of the web, was one-dimensional. Texts were lim­ited in how they could be com­bined and routed. Enter Twitter, a puz­zle — what the frack is it? We spent three-plus years puz­zling it out, in the end it has a rather sim­ple expla­na­tion — it’s the next ver­sion of SMS. You can do every­thing in Twitter you can do in SMS, and so much more. But essen­tially it feels very much like SMS, the same way blog­ging is very much like the web (so much so that that state­ment seems ludicrous).

Actually, call­ing this an argu­ment is ludi­crous. Dave merely asserts ex cathe­dra that Twitter is the next ver­sion of SMS. And why is that so? Because cranky uncle Dave says so. What lit­tle passes for argu­ment boils down to a tau­tol­ogy. “Twitter can do every­thing SMS can do and more.” Of course it can Dave, that’s because Twitter was designed to run on top of SMS you moron. In fact, the stan­dard response to Dave when he bleats that Twitter should invoke what­ever fea­ture he’s pump­ing in a given week is that it has to main­tain com­pat­i­bil­ity with SMS.

Which brings us to the point, and why Dave got the anal­ogy right but the logic behind it wrong. As I wrote before in the arti­cle I linked above, Dave Winer doesn’t grasp the dif­fer­ence between an appli­ca­tion and the plat­form that it runs on. In this case Web : Blog :: SMS : Twitter because the web and sms are plat­forms that the spe­cific appli­ca­tions of Twtter and blog­ging run over (and yes I know that Twitter runs on the web too, that’s irrelevant).

Once again Dave dis­plays a shock­ing lack of aware­ness of these con­cepts given that he is the so-called “father of blog­ging and RSS.”