What is Radio UserLand?

Monday, March 12, 2001 by Dave Winer.

Good morning! 

I planned, over the weekend to write a DaveNet piece about our new product, Radio UserLand, but this is always difficult, it's hard to write such a piece without it appearing to be an advertisement. It's not impossible, but difficult.

So I welcomed an invitation that came from Andy King of Web Reference, to do an email interview , to explain how our product plays with standards, and how it fits in the SOAP and XML-RPC network.

http://www.webreference.com/interviews/winer/

Please read the interview, it's the most concise explanation of what we've been doing at UserLand in the last year.

eBay and SOAP 

Then this morning there was an announcement by Microsoft and eBay that changes everything!

The big news is that eBay is implementing SOAP interfaces. Microsoft's spin is that it connects eBay to Microsoft developers. I was on the conference call and asked Steve Ballmer to clarify that the announcement is just as important for independent developers and people who work on Sun or IBM platforms.

The announcement is important because it gives developers on all SOAP-compatible platforms, including Microsoft .NET and Radio UserLand, a way to integate eBay functionality into our software and Web applications.

Our multi-year partnership with Microsoft is starting to bear some fantastic fruit!

Dave Winer