Coral reefs, the saga continues

Saturday, May 19, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Bravetrail asks how many coral reefs do fish need? 

The answer is of course that we only need one coral reef.  

But a federated server that ties into Twitter would not be a new coral reef, it would be part of the Twitter coral reef. 

Just as Feedburner is part of the RSS coral reef. And rumors say they're selling their piece of the reef for $100 million to Google. 

The danger is that Google is a super-power, and coral reefs depend on harmony and no one entity being too powerful. Such an entity might disrupt the fragile ecology of the whole reef. Of course they'll say they won't, but...  

Well I've gotten too far ahead of reality. There is no announced deal, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. This is the main reason I've been uncomfortable with a company (Feedburner) trying to make a business out of the centralizing something that only works if its decentralized. 

And I'd feel much more comfortable if a publishing company bought them, than a technology company. Publishing companies tend to accept technology as-is, technology companies, often try to play a game of lock the user in the trunk.