Here’s a few - chew on this for awhile……
To Hooman Radfar - my answer to the question: “what was the first web Widget?” - well the answer is simple. It was Jason DeFillippo’s Blogrolling widget (circa 2002). I went crazy over it - and even came up with an entire architecture for Jason (which after he passed on it) I blogged publicly. It was called “Blogrolling.com as a distribution system” - dated March 21st, 2003. Kudos to Jason - who then sold Blogrolling to Tucows in 2004 and…………..
Niall Kennedy found holes in NetVibes. Bu now they’re filled up.
Startup 2.0 on Feb. 26th in London. Client Ann Ziterkopf of Wee World will be speaking.
James Seng tells us Why Singapore is not ready for Web 2.0. I really really wanna make it to Singapore and create some change - there.
TechCrunch has taken MyBlogLog off of its page and everything is working better now. Hmmmmm.
Now this is important - someone has stolen the Maltese Falcon from John’s Grill!
Bob Blakely suggests reading Tom Van Vleck tell this story
ContentNext (Rafat Ali, Staci et al) is having a mixer in Seattle Feb 28th, At W Seattle
Jumping back to a meme from last week, Michael R. Bernstein commented that we could STILL do a dual approach license - and offer GPL version of PeopleAgrgegator as well. So in answer to that suggestion let me tell you of another story. I’ve showed MySQL’s dual licenses to four different sets of lawyers. Each set gave me a different opinion of the licenses, but (not surpringly) they agreed on one thing “having dual licenses for the same product is extremely problematic”. So we’re not gonna do that. One license. Here’s the deal - all in one place.
Looks like Kim Polese has been busy at SpikeSource.
Does anyone know what ever happened to Romance & Cigarettes? Its a fantastic movie, directed by John Turturro, starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslit, Christopher Walken, Steve Buschemi, Mandy Moore, Mary Louise-Parker. They sing, they dance they camp it up. Why was it never released wide? I saw it on a plane. Puzzlement. Great movie - sure to be a cult classic.
OK - now I’m over half done catching up. Finish tomorrow.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:58 am
We had a weblogs.com widget in 1999 or 2000.
Slowed the browser down something awful.
February 21st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Just for the record, I didn’t blow you off. It was an ambitious design for one guy to handle with no resources and at the time no job. Money trumped over vision in this case. It wasn’t a purposeful thing. I admired the vision but it was too far out of my personal area of “can-do”.
And I think if you want to call Blogrolling the first widget it should be with the caveat that it was the first intelligent widget for blogs. The data displayed was built purely out of your own preferences and guidelines for what you wanted to get info on as well as external influences like updates to weblogs.com, pings internally or blogger.com updates. All that was put into a highly customizable widget that you could get either via Javascript or a REST interface. I think the full feature set was something new and widely copied since but if you wanna go pure widget external counters like website story were the first.
Cheers.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:49 am
So I’d also like to point out that there should be distinctions between IMG tag widgets and JS widgets and REST widgets. There are also distinctions between logic levels of widgets.
I did remember another site that I think was a predecessor to blogrolling and that was Haloscan. They had the comment market locked when I started and they were a JS widget with advanced logic. It just had such horrific downtime that it was hated a lot by the bloggers. Also Haloscan didnt’ have a public face. I was a one man operation so all my users had my phone number and email address. I had the Sifry method down before Sifry if I’m not mistaken
JS widget providers need to take special care to write extremely delicate logic to fail fast if their DB or scripting lang doesn’t respond in say 1500ms. Anyway, I can expound on this for hours…
Cheers.