Interop

Dave Winer, on a critical aspect of the emerging blogspace: “We’re a house-divided for users but united on destruction.”  The entry of big players, like AOL and google, and their beta blogging tools, provides an opportunity for the use of truly interoperable standards — but, as Dave calls it, things might be breaking the other way, toward a fragmented, proprietized industry.  That would be too bad for the Net and unfortunate for users, even if it does ensure that a few companies can hold onto a few more customers — and their data — for longer.  There are obviously many ways to see this problem, but the only ways that seem legitimate to me are ones that ensure choice for users over the long-run.