Richard of Read/Write Web interviews Tim O’Reilly on the idea of Web 2.0 which, since the conference, has become the codeword for the web as a platform meme. Here’s Tim on RSS:
I mean it’s the classic example of Clayton Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma. When HTML came out everybody said “Hey this is so crude, you can’t build rich interfaces like
you can on a PC – it’ll never work”. Well it did something that people wanted, it kind of grew more and more popular, became more and more powerful, people figured out ways to
extend it. Yes a lot of those extensions were kludges, but HTML really took over the world. And I think RSS is very much on the same track. It started out doing a fairly simple job, people found more and more creative things to do with it, and hack by hack it
has become more powerful, more useful, more important. And I don’t think the story is over yet.
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