Well, since installing software over a remote CD mount is a slow affair at best, I guess I’ll use the time to complete my document my thoughts from this morning…
Blogger is a very interesting tool. It has a lot of possibilities. I still remember the first time I heard about it and about the folks at Pyra Labs (I feel a instant affinity with them thanks to their use of Labs in their company name! 😉 )…. it was when they were out of money and couldn’t afford to keep their service running. They did something which is very unique and IMHO honorable. They told their users what their state was. I loved the fact the the bloggers all over the place contributed whatever amounts they could in order to help the folks at Pyra get a new server to keep the service running. If that isn’t a show of user loyalty I don’t know what is!
Pyra/Blogger has one problem. Which is a revenue model. It is one thing to build a service while thousands of users dig and like. It’s another thing to convert it into a business. I haven’t spent enough time in evaluating how and what they’re doing for this, but it’s the kind of thing I like to think about — building something which lots and lots of people like a lot and at the same time doing it in a way which is a viable business. There have been more than enough cool applications which came out in the past few years which got the first part right, but they failed on the second part. I sincerely hope the folks at Blogger get it right. I see the potential, but the potential sources of revenue are indirect at best, but still viable IMHO.
I have lots of ideas for feature creep into a tool like blogger. I’m sure other people have thought of them already, but some of them are worth mentioning. Starting with obviously adding the comments feature into blogger by default rather than people having to tie it in through third party add-ons or configurations. Providing the ability to backdate entries, an integrated search tool, a more feature rich template for the power-users and just more simple customizable templates for the not-so-power-users.
One which would be way cool, and is the topic of this blog, is having a blogger version for the Palm. Like yesterday at dinner, we were talking about something and I remember saying that one of the things we talked about would make it to my quotes file…. but by the time I got to a computer, I’d already forgotten what it was. And it’s been bugging me all day. If only there was a Blogger version for the Palm, which would allow me to write a blog entry on the road. Then I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to post!
Now there are two ways this could work. For those people who have a wireless connection to their Palm device, the entry could be posted and published immediately. That seems really easy to do as long as they can already use abrowser on their handheld. However, I still maintain that wireless access on Palm devices is primitive at best. It’s just not there yet. And besides, my guess is that bloggers despite being early adopters and technophiles would still be a rather price-sensitive demographic which realize that wireless access from Palm’s just doesn’t deliver the bang for the buck yet. So the other approach would be to write a conduit which allows the blog entries on the Palm to get posted when doing a HotSync. Technically feasible. Easy to write to I guess, except I doubt I’ll be doing that anytime soon… so if anyone wants to take that idea and run with it and make it available to the blogger population… more power to you! (or course this would require that Blogger allow the user to backdate posts by specifying the time stamp for the post instead of Blogger assigning the timestamp…)
So who’s going to write the Blogger client for the Palm!??