Monday, May 23, 2005

Steve Gillmor: On Thursday, Google laid down a 60-day window for offering RSS support in their Fusion operating system/office suite hybrid. On Sunday night Steve Jobs laid down a 60-day window for RSS enclosure support inside iTunes. Today, as the smoke clears from these two cannon blasts across Microsoft's bow, Bill Gates must surely realize he's just been upgraded to the RSS revolution. Hoisted on his own petard. (Via Scripting News.) It's rather interesting how ideas on synchronous-asynchronous media connectivity, time-shifting, flexible n-to-m communication, and presence that were hot but unrealizable in the late 90s are coming back through bottom-up accretion. The different pieces came about to solve specific problems rather than as pieces of a grand architecture. But they are individually so useful and unobtrusive that linking them up is is manageable and fun, unlike the top-heavy digital bureaucracy of big standards and architecture committees. 10:03:50 PM