Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Steve Gillmor points to a three-part podcast discussion between myself, Steve, Dan Farber and Mike Vizard about lots of stuff. The best part is where I told Dan I was his worst nightmare. Emailing with Adam Curry today, who's been listening to the discussion, he says his favorite part is where I said that horse and buggy drivers used to have jobs too. Good for a few laughs, for sure.  

New York's John Heillemann explains Google's face-off with the book publishers. "The dispute is about more than books," he says and that's exactly right. And it's not just about old media either, they want to suck up and repurpose our stuff too. I've been saying the same thing to everyone who will listen. Their fight with book publishers is just the opening act with their fight with all media, and our interests and theirs (Google's) are opposite.  

BTW, just for kicks, ask the EFF to put something in their rights of bloggers document that explains copyright for bloggers. They won't put it in because Google controls them. Ask. See if they'll do it. If they will, I'll retract the claim. 

So how could Google be so utterly evil when they employ such enthusiastic and idealistic people? I don't know. You see this at lots of Silicon Valley companies. The guys in the board room have cold hearts, but they spin a good yarn, and get good people to keep their servers running. 

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft have explained their RSS strategies, Richard MacManus is looking for Google to have one too. 

Jim Amoss: "We want word from Washington that a great American city will not be left to die." 

New Flickr set: "I drove around New Mexico in July 2004, considering it as a place to move to later in the year. Did my first road podcast on this trip." 

Yahoo hit a home run last night. Very low key, quiet little invasion of RSS Land, in a very thoughtful way. This is the advantage Yahoo has, almost no one feels threatened by them, so they can turn on a few hundred million RSS readers in one step and it makes the top item on Memeorandum without anyone expressing any fear. An enviable posiiton.  

John Battelle almost gets there today in figuring out where the limits are for Google. First, Microsoft is not the prior art, Netscape is. What was their failure? They didn't create opportunities for other tech companies to lock them in. That's where P/E comes from in the tech world. You need a growing community of businesses who depend on your survival to keep you growing. The leaders at Netscape didn't get that they had a wonderful platform -- HTML and HTTP. Instead they tried to create a new one, Java, and that was wrong. They died for that sin. I think Google misunderstands that their platform is advertising, that's a temporary transitional thing, the real platform is (doh) Search. Why do you think I called for their competitors to clone the Google API without the limits? Because I gave up on Google ever figuring this out. But there's still time. They could open up their back end and let the entrepreneurial juices work toward locking them in. It's too much to expect Microsoft or Yahoo to figure this out, btw (although I will support either of them the instant they do). I will also let you know if Google decides to live instead of cashing it all in. The only way to escape Netscape's fate for Google is to unlock the door and let other developers build components that run in and build on their cloud, without limits. 

Apparently Microsoft has announced Fremont, which is their foray into online classified advertising. Remember I said that Google Base wouldn't be without competition? This is what I was thinking of. 

NY Times: "The Grateful Dead's decision to stop a Web site from offering free downloads of its music has fans threatening to boycott the band's recordings." 

One year ago today, Brent Simmons wrote of the virtues of XML-RPC. To be clear, the XML-RPC site is not on a UserLand server, it was at one time, but not now (as if that mattered). Too much is made of personality differences, frankly it's an excuse offered when people don't have any pragmatic reasons to reinvent. Why change the names of things that are well-known? I was struck that in the DNA world, humans and mice share 99 percent of their genetic structure. God didn't see the need to change the names of things, so why do Sun and IBM? Microsoft has embraced RSS, why hasn't Sun? Why hasn't IBM? Or have they, and it's just a few of their employees who make it seem otherwise? (Answer: They have.) What about Google? XML-RPC is part of the working set. It's in use all over the place, quietly helping things be compatible. It's earned its place. It's time for people to stop using the fig-leaf-size excuse that they don't like certain people. It's pretty obvious that's not much of a reason to make things incompatible. 

An analogy. I don't like shrimp. Never have. I've tried eating shrimp, but I just don't like the taste. Same thing with crawfish and lobster. No matter how you dress it up, I don't like shrimp. Last night at the Yahoo party they served a huge variety of shrimp dishes. Everyone but me (it seemed) was enjoying the food. I didn't stop the event and say we need to all move to a different bar in a different city because I don't like the food being served here. I appreciated that I am not the only person there, and I'm used to working around this peculiarity of mine (which I recognize it as, not a fault of others). This is what adults do when they don't like something or somebody. They don't whine and call people names and try to stop the party.  

Mike Arrington reports from a Yahoo press briefing in SF about RSS last night, which I attended. They're including a nice smallish RSS reader in their Mail app. I had seen it before, and it's a River of News aggregator. The food was good, the company excellent. I got to meet Om Malik, and had a good talk with Anil Dash, who tells me that TypePad has some very nice OPML support. 

I've received a bunch of email about yesterday's last post. I do provide a fair amount of background information in the previous days' posts. I am a customer, paid full retail price for both Macs and the iPod. All have their factory default settings for connecting iPods to Macs. I don't owe Apple anything. FYI, I had exactly the same experience when I connected the iPod to my iBook when I was in NYC, on Thursday, but this time I was watching carefully to be sure that I didn't click OK to any dialogs giving it permission to delete all the content on the iPod.