Month: <span>August 2002</span>

New feature: Radio now sends and receives outline-change notifications over AIM and Jabber. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Let me explain:…

What IM gives us:

1. It’s fast because IM is designed to be fast. That’s the nature of the transport.

2. It works behind firewalls and NAT (which includes lots of broadband users). Again — it’s made that way.

3. It saves bandwidth, since Radio no longer needs to poll over HTTP to see if an outline has been updated.

4. Bonus: Your copy of Radio will know who’s subscribed to your outline. With a little UI work (on the way), you’ll be able to see this info in your browser, and subscribe to your subscribers (and theirs, and theirs, and so on and so on…).

Last, and most important: This is a first step towards opening up all kinds of doors for distributed Internet application development.

Think about it… The milestone here is simple notification about changes to a file over a given IM protocol — no big deal, right?

What’s new is that it’s all open: the architecture in Radio is open and extensible, the protocols are known (and you can add your own at will), and the message format is a non-proprietary standard.

Think about what else we might do a year from now… or 5 years from now… The mind boggles…

New feature: Monthly archives. You can now generate archive pages for your Radio weblog, which display all of the posts for a given month. Check a box, and you’re done…

Mark Jenkins: “In erecting bulwarks around their domains, the major music businesses have left no entrance for the serendipity that kept the pop industry lively (and profitable) for decades. Yet the barbarians at those padlocked gates are the only people who can save the major labels’ dwindling empires.”