Dozens of Websites
Monday, March 27, 1995 by Dave Winer.
Good Morning!
What a grrrrreat weekend! Mama mia. It got beautiful again. Flowers budding. Beers to drink.
Listenin to old Beatles this morning. Everybody's trying to be my baby! I didn't stay late. Brought her home. Had a nice clean date. She loves you. Yeah! Eight days a week.
These songs realllly evoke strong memories of my childhood.
My grandpa gave me a transistor radio with an earphone for my eighth birthday. High tech! Even back on the top bunk, listening to Cousin Brucie on WABC, or the good guys on WMCA, in the Winer family's Jackson Heights apartment, DaveNet was rocking out.
Hey diddle diddle, I'll play my fiddle.
As long as she got a dime, the music will never stop!
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WOMEN'S WEBSITES 
Every new website begets more websites. If I have one, I want my friend to have one, so I can point to it. And so they can point to my site. Someday I'll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. It'll be cool. [Billions of Websites, 2/18/95.]
Eventually, the online world will be managed by women. The role of men, as usual, will be to make it safe for women to create and run our civilization. We'll bring them technology. The information superhighway won't be a cave. It'll be a home. I know this is wildly optimistic. Reality will probably be something less than this. But the unmistakable women's touch, even in a post-feminist age, will make logging on more like coming home. [Random Breathless Stuff, 11/5/94.]
A website isn't like a magazine or a newspaper. It's like a front porch. Decorated with all the things you like, things that say something positive about you. And unlike real-world front porches, my porch will point to my friend's porches. Walk a web of mutual friends. Those will be the Billions of Websites, IMHO. [Two Views of OpenDoc, 3/21/95.]
If you're thinking about getting onto the web someday, today's the day! [A Big Tree Falls, 3/23/95.]
It's happening!
If you want to see a collection of websites created by and managed by women, jump to .
The people are expressive, honest, funny, brave, and for the most, very positive. It's a network of friendships you can walk.
After spending a couple of hours with the women of the web, I went back and redesigned my home page. Put up some drapes.
Yes ma'am, my home page is much more homey now.
Cooool!
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MAJOR ONLINE SERVICES WEBSITES
I went looking for the websites of the major online services. Here's what I found.
o doesn't have one. [The services are listed in alphabetic order.]
o has a very competent presence. There's a lot of information on the company, their online system, how it currently works with the Internet, where they're headed. You can find out all about the Spry acquisition. I didn't read the whole site, but I got the feeling that it's all there, and they have a Dig We Must attitude.
o is aggressive. Owned by Rupert Murdoch; you can see the connection to the Fox network, which he also owns. They talk about the new fX cable network, they have the whole schedule on the website. I wish all the networks did this... Interesting site.
o wins the DaveNet award for creative sysopping. It's a very attractive website. And they do something that I think all the online services should do -- scout their message boards for great essays and accumulate them for display on the web. A win-win. The writers on eWorld compete for presence at the website. It's a badge they can wear. It encourages better writing, making eWorld a richer online system. Systematic excellence. Cool!
o has a very nerdy look and dry presence. And there are wierd characters on their home page! I found this really interesting. Do they understand that people who use Macintoshes might show up at www.microsoft.com?
o doesn't have a website.
I've included pointers to the five websites on UserLand's page.
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MACWEEK EDITORIAL
Check out this week's MacWEEK (3/27/95) for a great editorial on Apple's strategic options. They say "Apple can do something immediately to bring back developers and kick start its market share gains much faster. The company should abandon key markets it has mysteriously entered with derivative, "me-too" products... Apple must focus on what it does best: supply the best computer, operating system and infrastructure and let third parties fill in the blanks. Whatever piddling revenue Apple derives from its lackluster success in areas such as e-mail, scripting and network hardware cannot possibly make up for the damage it does to developers who can build better products and service customers more efficiently than Apple's technocracy."
This echoes the sentiments of my Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom piece, 11/26/94, where I said: "Apple should stop looking inward for the answer. Do your software shopping in the developer world. You get there sooner and it costs less. When you shut down developers, you're cutting off the life support system for users. Today's Mac market is bigger than the DOS market was back in the mid-80s. If the economics were tweaked, if Apple got out of the way, the market would be creating millionaires again."
I know about email and scripting. If Apple admitted that it isn't able to serve all the needs of all emailers and script writers; created blue sky for developers -- we'd be able to raise money, run ads, staff up, and really develop the potential of the Macintosh platform.
Dave Winer
PS: Heard on KFOG -- faxes represent 40 percent of all business phone costs. It seems there's an opportunity to bust that down to 10 percent with some new networking technology. Faxes represent a very inefficient use of phone lines when there are computers nearby on both ends of the transmission. A few new wires and a couple of new boxes could save a business huge amounts of money. Maybe some new standards are needed? Maybe Delrina can do something here?
PPS: A couple of essays ago I talked about a webbed version of SimCity. An extroverted SimCity would be great. But an introversion would be great too. Imagine double-clicking on a hospital to enter the SimCity hospital simulator. It would be unreal. Or maybe *very* real!
PPPS: The new version of Netscape, version 1.1, has support for tables. Tables are popping up all over the place. But we don't have a table editor. Tables are a bitch to create by hand. I did one just to see how it works. If you have the source code for a competent table designer/editor on the shelf, dust it off, make it create HTML output. You'll find an instant market.
PPPPS: My masthead page has a list of friends who have their own websites. Today the list is small, but I hope it gets bigger. If you have your own website, send me a pointer and I'll add it to my masthead. Let's pioneer a new form of social behavior!