2002/02/28 writing and planning

James Fallows in the latest NYRB

I will relish reading Fallow's latest NYRB essay: "The story of technology is largely the story of people who guess wrong about which problems will be easy to solve and which will be hard."

MyHaas

I learned yesterday that MyHaas runs on the open source product metadot.net (built with Perl). There was mention of a SOAP interface to calagenda. Hmmm...I'll have to follow up on that reference.

Issue of focus

Dave Winer complains that google is branching out into too many things, including the latest: Google Compute. It seems so natural for people and companies and other human organizations to keep expanding, reaching out to try more -- sometimes overstretching. (I do it all the time) Google's search engine is still amazing -- and I hope that it stays that way.

But Winer's complaint reminds me of how I feel about Userland at times. Isn't Userland spreading itself out too thin? Manila is what got me into using Frontier -- and I still think of it as the killer product of Userland. (For us, we can't expect everyone to install Radio on their machines. With Manila, at least we can set up a server -- and others can use it.) But very little work has been done on it. Radio seems to be the favored child these days. Other people feel that Frontier is being neglected at the expense of Radio.

(And isn't saying that Amazon has become "Nothing Interesting At All" a tad extreme....Amazon.com is simply the most interesting source of information on books out there....)

Jan Mar

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