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Custom browser for Facebook
Thursday, August 13, 2009 by Dave Winer.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, my partner in the Bad Hair podcast, has a scoop worthy of comment on Scripting News. 
Apparently Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a new venture capitalist, is backing a venture to create a custom browser for Facebook.
There are many millions of people who would go for this, it's a no-brainer.
On the other hand, it's a throwback to an earlier era -- AOL also had its own browser. Helps cement Facebook's position as the AOL for this decade.
The silo gets cushier, but it's still a silo. 
Marshall goes on to say "it's contrary to the growing storm of support building for a distributed framework for social networking." Amen to that.
BTW, we have a great pair of guests for our podcast, live this evening at 7PM Pacific. Details forthcoming.
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Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer
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.Last update: 8/13/2009; 9:53:57 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
