social networking and web services

Filed in archive Technology on February 17, 2004

Technology Review has a noteworthy interview with Rael Dornfest. I never heard of him, but maybe I just take a look on the O'Reilly logo usually.

"TR: What makes RSS so important?

DORNFEST: It's one of the most widely deployed Web services around. It's easily decentralized. Blogging, because of RSS, has gone from a popularity contest---how many times has my site been pinged?---to discovery of information. The browse metaphor for search has gone by the wayside. I think that RSS and syndication and blogs broadened it out. There was a lot of hype about this a couple of years ago but it's only in the last year that things really started bubbling. I use weblogs to find information more than I use Google. I follow trails. Google will find you obvious answers. Google will find you what you're looking for. Blogs, with RSS, will find you what you never expected to find."

"... It's the "small pieces, loosely joined" idea, to use Dave Weinberger's phrase. Yes, Microsoft can zoom in, but other people can still do pretty well. You can whip up an Orkut pretty quickly. But you should go and see what kind of stuff Microsoft is interested in with social software, and learn from that.

Innovation is all over the place. That's what gets me most excited, seeing this stuff we've been talking about show up all over the place. It's coming from all corners. It's coming from the Citizen engineers. It's coming from the research labs. It's coming from the logical progression of things. And it's coming from those brilliant people who are either burnt out, or are out of jobs, or who are rebuilding after the bubble burst. There's no one place to look for it. "