Gadgetopia

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent Front Page: A very interesting angle on the Echo Project and what it means to blog platform vendors.

“Given enough will, everyone could be embracing the same API - which would be marvelous for the user, but completely disastrous for many of the weblogging companies. An API that can transfer entries from one system to another without fuss would introduce a frictionless market to weblog tools. If the market can move entries from Radio to Movable Type to Blogger and back again without losing anything, then the market will naturally gravitate towards the combination of the best and the cheapest. Until now, doing so would have cost time and effort, but given a complete Echo spec, the launch of a new product could gut a lesser rival’s customer base in a matter of hours.”