Thu

Mar 1
2007

Marc Hedlund

Marc Hedlund

'sfearthquakes' on Twitter

Apropos of NOTHING AT ALL, you can now get Bay Area earthquake information through Twitter by following sfearthquakes. Nice, Coda! (Coda's had a busy week -- he also backed up a righteous beat-down with code to fix it. I like working with people who are hilarious and right at the same time.)

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

[Update: added ls and mount, plus find at Nat's suggestion. Having fun with this. The comments are good, too.]


tags: attaboys  | comments: 82   | Sphere It
submit:

 
Previous  |  Next

5 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/5285

» Reinventing Unix Commands on the Web from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

Marc Hedlund: One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the origin... Read More

» Instant Business Model from untyping

Mark Hedlund 'sfearthquakes' on Twitter" href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes_o.html">writes: One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the ... Read More

» Everything old is new again from James N. Sears

Maybe there's a correlation to the fact that I'm not a big Twitter fan and the fact that never in my life have I used wall. And that, on the other hand, find / | grep is always right at... Read More

» Business Model for the Web from captsolo weblog

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find an... Read More

» UNIX Commands = Startup Ideas from Devon Strawn

Marc Hedlund reveals his favorite business model suggestion for entrepreneurs.... Read More

Comments: 82

  Andrew Sidwell [03.02.07 05:33 AM]

Surely rn became Google Groups? The closest to Bloglines I can think of is "tail --follow".

  Tim O'Reilly [03.02.07 07:52 AM]

Brilliant, Marc! Of course pipes is trying to be more than just sh, it's also including sort, uniq, grep, and working on cat as built-ins.

Following your analogy, we have yet to truly see perl for the web.

But the command I'm really missing is su!

  Raymond Brigleb [03.02.07 08:09 AM]

Marc, good point about taking UNIX commands to the web, as a business model. I'd take that one step further - increasingly, I feel that good business models for the web are just taking desktop GUI tools and bringing them to the web.

For example, there's plenty of versions of 'dig' for the web, but a version of http://www.applesource.biz/software/momd/ meets a wiki would be great, and in many ways, a more natural and logical fit than a $20 desktop tool.

  Jeremy Zawodny [03.02.07 01:33 PM]

Tim:

Maybe Pipes is more like busybox then?

  Marc Hedlund [03.02.07 01:56 PM]

Tim and Jeremy: You're right, but I think Pipes will do better if it has as much support as possible for /usr/local/src, and doesn't try to make everything a shell built-in. That would be great.

su.....hmm, not sure what that would be. OpenID might become rlogin?

  Coda Hale [03.02.07 03:02 PM]

Kristopher: Jinx, owe me a coke!

It looks like we had the idea at the same time (after last night's trembler), registered our accounts at the same time (you're #805369, I'm #805339), had the same idea for the user photo (I like yours better though), got the code working at roughly the same time, and even had the same idea for prefixing the data with "Whoa." (Though my prefixes change with the magnitude -- it starts cursing above 6.0.)

Great minds think alike?

  Jeremy Zawodny [03.02.07 03:20 PM]

OpenID could be the new ssh-agent.

  Marc Hedlund [03.02.07 04:42 PM]

Jeremy: that would be awesome. I hope it does. I think it needs more than what it has now to become ssh-agent, but if it gets there, that would be fantastic.

Oops, in my previous comment I should have said /usr/local/bin, not /usr/local/src (though the latter would be great, too).

  Alan Rimm-Kaufman [03.02.07 07:38 PM]

Pushing the joke a bit:

finger: linkedin.com
mv: travelocity.com
man: wikipedia.org
chown: ebay.com
sudo: secondlife.com

:)

Alan

  Marc Hedlund [03.03.07 12:58 AM]

Alan, man is clearly Safari! Remember your manners, sir! ;)

chown/eBay is awesome. I guess you're right about finger/LinkedIn -- maybe ICQ was really w + talk.

  Alan Rimm-Kaufman [03.03.07 04:43 AM]

jobs: monster.com
yes: [nsfw]
join, merge: myspace.com

OK, enough of this game!

:)

  Tim O'Reilly [03.03.07 07:39 AM]

Alan -- you're taking it as a joke, but I think Marc was both serious and right-on. The old Unix commands were ways to make the computer do something useful. People have been re-creating those functions on the web.

The very first one, of course, is the analogy between the shell prompt and the URL line, something Andrew Schulman first called out ten years ago at the first perl conference. (See Early history of the web pipes concept.)
Even more primordial though: the internet itself replaced uucp.

Marc -- thanks for speaking up for Safari. It's certainly a recreation of man, and a very successful one, but you'd have to say that wikipedia is an even more successful incarnation.

A few more:

vi --> writely

perl --> openkapow (for a gui tool trying to do some of the same things, since of course perl is still perl on the web)

dd --> S3?? (that one's a stretch)

dd's ebcdic/ascii translation could be babelfish :-)

ascii as stdin/stdout --> html as stdin/stdout

I keep thinking that there ought to be some others that are untapped, but they won't occur to me until someone, in a stroke of brilliance, realizes just how to transfer old ideas to the new medium.

  Kevin Burton [03.04.07 12:59 AM]

Twitter is also finger dude..... think about it :)

  Michael R. Bernstein [03.04.07 01:31 PM]

Untapped possibilities:

whois - OpenID could become this in addition or instead of ssh-agent, LinkedIn and other sites are currently filling this role, but they will have to interoperate at an OpenID-like level to become truly ubiquitous.

top, traceroute, mtr - we don't yet have fundamental tools to tell us how the web infrastructure is performing.

diff, patch - pastebin sites could become this with a few tweaks.

latex, cups - should be obvious.

  Jing Lee [03.05.07 10:03 AM]

'whoami' & 'id' ==> openid et al.
the ~/.login file ==>various dashboards (personalized default 'home' page)

  John Herren [03.05.07 06:14 PM]

tail -f | grep: technorati.com
sort: digg.com

And an opportunity:
which

  Chris Wanstrath [03.06.07 02:14 PM]

I may be biased, but I think Cheat is the new man.

  Brent Castle [03.06.07 06:18 PM]

Maybe a stretch... but it's fun!
less .bash_history | grep -e "tag" > del.icio.us

  rabble [03.07.07 07:32 PM]

Actually we were having that discussion when twitter was first a spark of an idea. It was a combination of .plan files and finger. Back in the pre web university days everybody was updating their .plan files to say what they were doing, and fingering eachother to read them. That's twitter today.

  Kingsley Joseph [03.08.07 06:44 PM]

My fortune says, I want more.

  Emil [03.12.07 11:25 PM]

Not sure if this is available in Unix, but the CTRL + ALT + F# Linux combo to switch between multiple shells reminds me of tabbed browsing, and both brilliant features (maybe not commands).

Im currently working on something that could be said to be inspired by Cls, but the command I would really like to have is Del to clean up.

  Lenny [03.21.07 01:12 PM]

If vi is Writely, pico is Writeboard.

bc is Google calculator.

whatis is Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is a lot of things, isn't it?)

ln is TinyURL.

tar is Archive.org.

. is any site vulnerable to XSS.

  Giles Bowkett [03.21.07 03:55 PM]

That Unix commands as business model thing is dead-on.

  Jamie [03.21.07 06:28 PM]

Not to be a troll, but actually listserv became eGroups, who got bought out by Yahoo!

  Marc Hedlund [03.21.07 06:31 PM]

Hey, Jamie,

Well, LISTSERV became ONEList, which merged with eGroups, which got bought by Yahoo! and then became Yahoo! Groups. Or so I understand. :)

  Marc Hedlund [03.21.07 06:36 PM]

Thought of another one: tee became RSS.

  Nick S [03.21.07 10:33 PM]

I'd been thinking of Twitter as access to more frequently-updated .plan files, obtained by finger. (It must be nearly a decade now since I kept track of friends by checking their shell logins.)

  Nick S [03.21.07 10:40 PM]

And double-checking, rabble confirms it.

I see a lot of the UNIX one-liner thing in Google's search shortcuts: the spell-check (ispell), the unit conversions, etc. And I'm left wonderin how much of Danny O'Brien's secret-kludge-dotfiles translates to the web.

  justinf [03.22.07 02:09 AM]

podcast subscriptions = cronjob + rsync

  justinf [03.22.07 02:14 AM]

wikipedia = the all powerful MAN command

myspace= groupadd + chown?

  Aaron [03.23.07 11:11 AM]

top, ps aux are Alexa and Google Analytics
latex is Textile and Markdown formats

And more abstractly:
chmod is Creative Commons

  Greg Detre [04.04.07 01:25 PM]

Hmmm. emacs -> firefox?

  Michael Mahemoff [04.15.07 01:31 PM]

qlock.com=date
ytalk=ajax chat (meebo etc)
tags=symlinks (break the hierarchy model)

On the programming side:

dabbledb.com=libdb
ning.com=gcc
webwait.com=time (shameless plug)

  Eric TF Bat [04.18.07 04:33 AM]

fortune = www.davesweboflies.com

perl or python or whatever = Greasemonkey, perhaps?

mkdir = the late, unlamented infogami

  Michael R. Bernstein [04.21.07 09:35 PM]

Hmm.

Make -> Ning ?

  Ugo Di Profio [05.08.07 08:06 AM]

For the ways they are mostly used, rather than for how they operate, sed could correspond to greasemonkey

Tim: "transfer old ideas to the new medium."

Speaking of business instead of unix commands, this conversation reminds me of a recent post by Om Malik:

"These young businesses are not inventing new things that distinguish them. It is the way they are using technology to execute and interface with their customers that makes them special."

  Jovanni Remington [07.02.07 07:59 PM]

db73cc9c32c42aae2dfab814796fc6b2

  emlak [07.16.07 12:28 PM]

OpenID could be the new ssh-agent.

  J.O. From Urban MVP [10.09.07 02:54 PM]

OpenID can't be the new ssh-agent simply because it would require a huge switching cost for everything to be rewritten for this new process.

  Simit [04.11.08 03:43 AM]

Thank you

  sohbet [05.23.08 04:11 PM]

And I'm left wonderin how much of Danny O'Brien's secret-kludge-dotfiles translates to the web. thks

  Sohbet [06.08.08 03:22 AM]

That Unix commands as business model thing is dead-on.

  muhabbet [06.11.08 03:58 AM]

Unix code working well

  Havalandırma [06.14.08 03:20 PM]

Unix code working well

  mirc [06.26.08 03:52 AM]

thank you

  Havuz [06.28.08 02:27 AM]

And I'm left wonderin how much of Danny O'Brien's secret-kludge-dotfiles translates to the web. thks

  Oyunlar1 [06.28.08 04:27 AM]

Your comment contains very useful information about all thank you..

  kpss cd [08.14.08 12:38 AM]

And I'm left wonderin how much of Danny O'Brien's secret-kludge-dotfiles translates to the web. thks

  sohbet [08.28.08 06:39 PM]

And I'm left wonderin how much of Danny O'Brien's secret-kludge-dotfiles translates to the web. thks

  şiir [09.03.08 02:01 AM]

The web design is a sensitive area. The functionality defines limits but knowing these we have enough freedom to be creative. Most clients are looking for original and unique layout designs. In such cases, creativity is an absolute must. Even an artistic touch can be helpful…
thanks.

  yeni mp3 [09.03.08 02:26 AM]

The web design is a sensitive area. The functionality defines limits but knowing these we have enough freedom to be creative. Most clients are looking for original and unique layout designs

  ünlüler [10.21.08 10:48 AM]

OpenID can't be the new ssh-agent simply because it would require a huge switching cost for everything to be rewritten for this new process.

  Radyo [10.23.08 05:12 PM]

Design is not art, that’s for sure. Design is one of the basic parts of the Engineering process which involves applying knowledge and resources to achive a desired objective.

  gazeteler [11.03.08 04:06 PM]

I am Very thank full the owner of this blog. Becouse of this blog is very imformative for me.. And I ask u some thiing You make more this type blog where we can get more knowledge. and any one tell me how can I find this type blog

  estetik [11.06.08 09:58 AM]

Great post. congrats.

  hikaye [11.09.08 05:29 PM]

Yes Thats is a good idea.
Hikaye

  emlak [11.10.08 09:10 AM]

thanks
Even an artistic touch can be helpful

  perde [11.10.08 09:12 AM]

thanks touch can

  Estetik [11.13.08 07:45 AM]

I wasn’t blaming you, it was my (sometimes lack of) English - not my native language. Glad I got want you meant in the end (and also everything from your latest link).
Asked typepad about how to remove no-follow, received a nice message back from them, but have to find time now to check their suggestions out (if I can work it out, that is).

  evden eve nakliyat [11.13.08 02:49 PM]

had the same idea for the user photo (I like yours better though), got the code working at roughly the same time, and even had the same idea for prefixing the data with "Whoa.

  Estetik [11.17.08 06:45 AM]

Maybe Pipes is more like busybox then?
httP://www.memekucultme.com

  Gogus buyutme [11.18.08 01:39 PM]

For those of you thinking that if they implement this it will eliminate some of the waiting and lines…

  Estetik [11.24.08 10:27 AM]

Where did you get trailers feed? You’ve done something I want to do for the redesign of my site, but I can’t seem to find a feed to read from.

  evden eve nakliyat [11.30.08 06:14 PM]

I’m working on a wrapper server for fcsh which is the Flex Compiler Shell speeds up the build times of your Flex builds -

  Sohbet [12.15.08 10:14 AM]

Where did you get trailers feed? You’ve done something I want to do for the redesign of my site, but I can’t seem to find a feed to read from.

Sohbet

  Sohbet [12.15.08 10:16 AM]

For the ways they are mostly used, rather than for how they operate, sed could correspond to greasemonkey

Tim: "transfer old ideas to the new medium."

  Oyun [12.30.08 04:56 PM]

Following your analogy, we have yet to truly see perl for the web.

But the command I'm really missing is su!

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

RECENT COMMENTS