Diego Doval's review of blogging API's, and the discussion that followed, is, as I said yesterday, an absolute must-read for developers working on either side of the interfaces. There really hasn't been any analysis of the APIs until this piece. He did a really good job. I hope it inspires more serious research into and discourse about the APIs and formats of blogging.

He confirms that there is nothing in the new broken Blogger API that the MetaWeblog API can't do. That gives me the confidence to say that the Blogger folk are really screwing up bigtime here. It's so important I'm willing to raise this issue publicly, and even go to the Google management, and board of directors, if necessary. It's that important.

We've been here before, many times. It's the infinte loop of Silicon Valley. Everyone but Microsoft has to work together, but some young company thinks they've won everything, and blows it for themselves, and everyone else. Let's not do this again. Please.

We're at an inflection point. We have a nice common API, based on compromise, around the API that Evan designed a couple of years ago. It was a good start, but it didn't cover all the functionality of other blogging tools so we extended it with the MetaWeblog calls. Evan says it doesn't do what he wants to do, so please explain what you need, and let's see if we can make it do it. Gratuitous incompatibility is not a very nice thing, esp after we detoured to be compatible with you. We gave up something for that, now at least have the decency to explain clearly why you can't work compatibly with us.

If we don't work together now, you-know-who is going to end up calling all the shots and I bet it won't work very well with Blogger or Dano or whatever.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 5/6/03; 5:41:59 PM - --