Saturday, January 21, 2006

Essay: Amyloo and Frontier's website framework. 

Kevin, if we had left RSS to the technology industry, it would be like Apple's version of RSS, except there would be 12 dozen of them, and none of them would interop. Instead, the consensus developed around the RSS that the New York Times used, and last time I checked they were in publishing, not technology. But there's an interesting question buried one level deeper, is the publishing industry the new technology industry? Are they doing better technology than the old technology industry? In the case of RSS, there's absolutely no doubt -- they are. Yahoo and Microsoft are following them, and that's the smartest thing any tech company can do. Google thinks they're the tail wagging the dog, but they may figure out that fighting the consensus isn't in their interest. Kevin himself once was a consensus-fighter, but wisely now has seen that his interest is in making users happy, not in undermining their will. I'd argue that Kevin, in doing so, has taken leave of the tech industry, and is joining up with the publishing industry, or the new tech industry, or who the hell cares what you call it. It just ain't Silicon Valley, that was my point. And let's not worry too much about Apple, they're a self-correcting problem, when viewed through the years. 

According to BusinessWeek, AOL is "building a platform off its massively popular AOL Instant Messenger service to better enable its users to share and create content." 

Want to know how lost in space Ning really is? Until I saw this post from Diego Doval, I had forgotten about it totaly, even though I had seen Mike Arrington's post about it yesterday. When Mike wrote about it, it totally didn't register. Diego has more mindspace with me. It wasn't a brilliant idea, it was an off-site compromise among people thinking more about their IPO than any clear concept of a product or service that would do anything anyone wanted.