Dave Winer's Crazy Train

One of my favorite bits of Ol’ Man Winer’s narcissistic personality is the way that he immediately goes into a frothing rage whenever anyone implies that his beloved RSS has been “killed.” Cue this hilarious bit of insanity prompted by a post by Jeffery Zeldman on his blog. The sum total of the post is quoted below:

It seems Twitter has completely removed the ability to consume their feeds via the open standard of RSS in favor of their more proprietary API formats. At the same time, Facebook seems to have done the same.

Note that there isn’t even the tiniest bit of judgement included in the post; just the fact that Twitter and Facebook have essentially stripped RSS from their websites (the feeds apparently are still there, just not exposed). Still, that’s enough to send Winer into a tizzy screaming, WHAT IF TWITTER KILLED CSS, HOW WOULD YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT MR. ZELDMAN? HOW WOULD YOU FEEL??!!??.

It would be sad if it wasn’t so damned funny.

Today’s trip on the Crazy Train is actually brought to us by everyone’s favorite breathless promoter of The New Shiny - Robert Scoble. In relating a conversation with Scooby about the world’s most over-promoted data-mining app, aka Color, Dave writes:

What if they gave you a piece of software that, when you took a picture on your iPhone, the picture would automatically show up on your iPad or Android phone? That would be pretty cool? No wires, no Bluetooth, no configuration. Since you’re logged in under the same name on all these devices, the only permission they would need is a preference that says “share photos with all my devices.”

As is often the case on the Crazy Train, someone in the comments points out that what Scoble, via Winer is describing already exists, or can be made to exist with existing products.

Hilariously, Scoble immediately jumps in screaming about how Color doesn’t need to sync (here’s a hint Bobby, Color is “syncing” it just doesn’t have a button that says so) and that Color also lets everyone in the room see your shitty photos. The fun part is that, according to Winer, Scoble was suggesting that Color should have rolled out the “spam the room pictures of my junk” feature later after everyone was already using the service.

I know it’s too much to ask clowns like Scoble to actually think before typing, but at least I can get some comedy out of it.

Ol’ Man Winer explains how the Zune could have been a market leader…by focusing on podcasts. I suppose you have to give the old bastard credit for being tenacious.

A quick link while I catch up on the crazy train. The douche-collective at TechCrunch declares RSS dead, and Ol’ Man Winer goes postal on them.

From today’s Winer Whacktardery:

I’m probably a fool for stepping into the middle of this, but here goes.

Yes, you are a fool.

NEXT!

From this piece:

I’ve long believed that the Internet will turn commerce upside-down. That what happened to journalism, software, music and video, is also happening to research and development.

Tell that to Fox News, Microsoft, Lady Gaga and James Cameron.

From this piece, referring to Twitter:

People just aren’t that interested in what other people think. And it’s damned difficult to speak your mind 140 characters at a time. Most of the time you can anticipate in advance what the misunderstandings will be, and self-edit. Then self-censor. Why bother going through all that michegas.

No, Dave, people just aren’t that interested in what you think.

Here, Dave laments the fact that he apparently can’t “blog a single idea, without researching anytihng [sic].” Which is ironic given the fact that Dave almost never performs any actual research before spewing his nuttery into the aether. But that aside, the really annoying thing here is Winer’s patented ability to ignore anything that doesn’t conform to his myopic worldview.

So, Dave, you want a blogging service that allows you to post short free-form notes. Too bad that Twitter was never developed, or Tumblr, or Posterous, or WordPress with a Tumblrblog theme, or just plain fucking WordPress where you write short notes. Or all of the fucking above.

Hells, looking at the current main page of my real blog I see:

• 4 “full-size” posts
• 2 reposts of shit from Twitter
• 2 links to external pages
• 1 cross-post from my Posterous content annex.
• 1 quick note

I know that Dave will never grasp this, but the content defines the content, not the vagaries of the CMS that’s hosting it.

If you were just to read this seemingly ill-informed screed from Ol’ Man Winer bemoaning the convoluted steps currently needed to share photos from his iPhone, you would assumes that it’s just the usual Dave Winer ignorance at play. If you read the comments though, you’ll see the true nature of Dave’s douchebaggery. You see, Dave knows full well about services like Posterous and Instagram, but he doesn’t “trust” them with is data. The fact that Flickr is no more trustworthy, and that he should be keeping backups of this shit never enters into the discussion. The bottom line is that unless a service exactly conforms to how Dave thinks it should be, it’s invisible to him.

Today Apple made an announcement (that the Beatles are now available on iTunes). Crazy Ol’ Man Winer, like every other punditard had a prediction. Dave predicted that Apple would introduce a revolutionary new app for iOS that would let your iPhone control iTunes. This is actually a brilliant idea. So brilliant that Apple released this app as one of the very first apps on iOS.