Jake Savin

Looks like when it comes to Google, Microsoft has some catching up to do on the Gadget Developer Relations front.

Having spent 10+ years working with, or on a super-fun, easily hackable, and powerful 2006==lead developer at UserLand”>Internet scripting platform, there’s one thing I’m certain of from personal experience on both sides of the platform problem: The more easily the tinkerers can start tinkering, the more real developers will buy in to your platform, and the more cool software they’ll ship on it.

To put it another way, if you lock out the tinkerers, either inadvertently or intentionally, you’re going to be limited to only so-called serious developers with real resources (read: paychecks). Those people aren’t going to ship the zillions of free, small widgets that will drive more platform awareness, and therefore more and more adoption. It’s exactly this positive feedback loop that platform developers should — no, must strive to catch, since without it, it hardly matters at all how slick, or integrated, or powerful the platform is: Nobody will use it.

After all, the whole idea behind a ‘Gadget’ platform is to provide a quick easy way to do rapid development of smallish widgets. Right?