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I know Winer's a great figure in the history of the Web, but this might be the most incoherent post I've seen this year. It made no sense to me, in that the his

I know Winer's a great figure in the history of the Web, but this might be the most incoherent post I've seen this year. It made no sense to me, in that the history lesson has nothing to do with the problem at hand, if indeed it is a problem at all. Winer needs to realize that his problems with Twitter are not the same as Twitter's problems on the road to success, as much as he'd like them to be.

tptacek 17y ago
Now would be a great time for someone to explain to me why Winer is considered a great figure in the history of the web.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  A pioneer in the areas of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and the MetaWeblog API, he is also the author of Scripting News, one of the oldest weblogs, established in 1997. He is generally credited with the exposition of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", now a world-wide phenomenon, and the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer
  - rms 17y ago
    He's right up there with Aaron Swartz.
  - numair 17y ago
    It's more than that, though. If you were around in the 90s, you'd know that Scripting News was, like, THE weblog. Everyone read it. Bill Gates famously read it, along with lots of other people in the tech world. Winer's writing was very, very influential in the Netscape era. In essence, a lot of today's tech pundits are basically trying to recapture what Winer had back in the day -- just like so many entrepreneurs are attempting to re-live the soda-drinking, pizza-eating, 24-year-old-with-an-IPO lifestyle of Marc Andreesen. I wish some of the people on here who don't have historical context wouldn't be so insulting and dismissive of people they know little about, aside from what others have told them. It doesn't make you look smart and snarky -- it makes you look young, naïve, and at least slightly arrogant. (And this is coming from an arrogant 24 year old, so ya know.)
    - dotcoma 17y ago
      you're right. but someone please tell Dave Winer he can do 140 character posts with wordpress, too ;)
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Couldn't disagree more...how was it incoherent at all? The comparison to me was this: 1. Visicalc reigned supreme. They got all the press and had all the market share for their vertical (like Twitter today) 2. Visicalc got complacent and didn't really innovate (like Twitter today) 3. Someone else did it better and took over the market (he's betting that this will happen to Twitter) I think his "improvements" to Twitter are debatable, but to be fair, he does make the point in the post that the specific improvements aren't what's crucial, just that users are going to demand innovation and Twitter hasn't really done much in that regard.
- dkasper 17y ago
  It's not like other company's haven't been trying to beat twitter at it's own game already though. Pownce, jaiku, laconica, etc. Twitter's api is really a killer feature that helps things stay fresh with new apps coming out all the time using their platform. That being said, I agree with the main point of the article, innovate or die.
  - catch404 17y ago
    I wonder what would happen if the competing apps made an abstraction layer for their APIs to map to Twitters, allowing App developers to develop for both.
    - tvon 17y ago
      The usual thing to do in this situation is or any competition to mirror the API twitter provides, and then to provide features on top of that. Then the developers just have to change a few API configs to use the new service (as opposed to using a new library, or something like that)
- mtts 17y ago
  I think his main improvement to Twitter is not debatable at all - being able to host your own and determining who can join and who can't - is key for microblogging like this to really take off. Twitter has shown the world that microblogging can be tremendously useful. Most businesses, however, will not use it if everyone can see what their employees are posting. Not to mention that a lot of businesses I know simply feel uncomfortable if they don't in some way own the servers that run stuff that's important to them.
deleted 17y ago
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tptacek 17y ago

Now would be a great time for someone to explain to me why Winer is considered a great figure in the history of the web.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
A pioneer in the areas of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and the MetaWeblog API, he is also the author of Scripting News, one of the oldest weblogs, established in 1997. He is generally credited with the exposition of RSS as "Really Simple Syndication", now a world-wide phenomenon, and the first to implement the feed "enclosure" feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer
- rms 17y ago
  He's right up there with Aaron Swartz.
- numair 17y ago
  It's more than that, though. If you were around in the 90s, you'd know that Scripting News was, like, THE weblog. Everyone read it. Bill Gates famously read it, along with lots of other people in the tech world. Winer's writing was very, very influential in the Netscape era. In essence, a lot of today's tech pundits are basically trying to recapture what Winer had back in the day -- just like so many entrepreneurs are attempting to re-live the soda-drinking, pizza-eating, 24-year-old-with-an-IPO lifestyle of Marc Andreesen. I wish some of the people on here who don't have historical context wouldn't be so insulting and dismissive of people they know little about, aside from what others have told them. It doesn't make you look smart and snarky -- it makes you look young, naïve, and at least slightly arrogant. (And this is coming from an arrogant 24 year old, so ya know.)
  - dotcoma 17y ago
    you're right. but someone please tell Dave Winer he can do 140 character posts with wordpress, too ;)

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

Couldn't disagree more...how was it incoherent at all? The comparison to me was this: 1. Visicalc reigned supreme. They got all the press and had all the market share for their vertical (like Twitter today) 2. Visicalc got complacent and didn't really innovate (like Twitter today) 3. Someone else did it better and took over the market (he's betting that this will happen to Twitter) I think his "improvements" to Twitter are debatable, but to be fair, he does make the point in the post that the specific improvements aren't what's crucial, just that users are going to demand innovation and Twitter hasn't really done much in that regard.

dkasper 17y ago
It's not like other company's haven't been trying to beat twitter at it's own game already though. Pownce, jaiku, laconica, etc. Twitter's api is really a killer feature that helps things stay fresh with new apps coming out all the time using their platform. That being said, I agree with the main point of the article, innovate or die.
- catch404 17y ago
  I wonder what would happen if the competing apps made an abstraction layer for their APIs to map to Twitters, allowing App developers to develop for both.
  - tvon 17y ago
    The usual thing to do in this situation is or any competition to mirror the API twitter provides, and then to provide features on top of that. Then the developers just have to change a few API configs to use the new service (as opposed to using a new library, or something like that)
mtts 17y ago
I think his main improvement to Twitter is not debatable at all - being able to host your own and determining who can join and who can't - is key for microblogging like this to really take off. Twitter has shown the world that microblogging can be tremendously useful. Most businesses, however, will not use it if everyone can see what their employees are posting. Not to mention that a lot of businesses I know simply feel uncomfortable if they don't in some way own the servers that run stuff that's important to them.

deleted 17y ago

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