Monday, June 26, 2006

David Berlind asks if RSS is the new Intranet protocol.  

Rex Hammock picture from BloggerCon II.  

People are still downloading the famous Dvorak movie. 

Rex Hammock's multi-part post-BloggerCon essay. 

Platform politics 

Scanning Greg Reinacker's latest roadmap for NewsGator, they support SOAP and REST, which I know from lots of experience means I have to work real hard just to try their stuff out. Too hard.

Amazon's S3 service took this approach and their uptake is too slow, there's no visible momentum (I know I'll get lots of links for saying that). Go to a developer event, no one is talking about S3. That's terrible because it's a good idea and it deserves attention. I wonder why they are so cheap with the interfaces. Get over your religion Greg, and support XML-RPC, I bet it makes a difference. I won't dig into your stuff unless you do. Too much work for me, and I don't think you're going to get the uptake.

That said, my first post-BloggerCon development project will involve S3. We have working code, even though it was a lot harder than it had to be to get there.

Speaking of open APIs, I got an invite to join Marc Canter's People Aggregator today. I bet you did too. Marc is a paradox to me. He makes such a big effort to support open standards, and I'm told they do support XML-RPC, and the MetaWeblog API, unlike Reinacker and Amazon. But when I offered to build a bridge between the OPML Editor and his aggregator he lectured me on how he was doing an outliner and how much better his vision of outliners was than mine. All the time I'm thinking to myself, if that were really true, if the tables were turned, I'd encourage support for those interfaces, so he could build a market for my superior product. Marc is a smart guy, but he could learn a trick or two. I imagine this note will appear on Phil Jones's Platform Wars site.

Let's see, I bet there's a law here, or a life lesson. Either you're going to be a platform vendor or not. If you choose to push a platform, don't go half way. Platforms that are picky usually don't gain traction. If you got a platform you must be open to all comers, enthusiastically, without reservation. I think this is what we were saying to Stewart Butterfield last week about Flickr's APIs.

Late afternoon coffee notes 

Doing a conference like BloggerCon is exhausting work. First, you work around the clock the week leading up to the show, spend a lot of time waiting for stuff to happen, for people to call back, etc. You make lots of lists, do things on the list, scratch things off, move undone tasks from one list to another, and in the end, there's plenty of stuff you never got to do, but somehow it all works anyway.

Human beings are amazing at filling in the blanks. And the people who show up for an event like BloggerCon are the most generous, optimistic, and rewarding people to work for. In the end, it works. After it's over you're tired. So there's lot of sleep and lounging around and letting the head empty out. Yawning, watching TV, mending, healing, and then waking up.

My to-do list has a different sort of task on it now. Do the laundry. Pay bills. Renew my car registration. Hardly any phone calls to return.

I noted that my email link has been broken for some time. If you sent me mail in the last month or so by clicking on the mail icon in the upper right corner of this page, you might try again. I didn't get the mail. A table overflowed somewhere in a mail server. I went looking for it today and gave up. I pointed it to another server, and went on with life. The mail is being delivered once again.