Dave Winer's Pragmatic Turn

I’ve not been paying much attention to Dave Winer recently. But it turns out he’s launching a bunch of stuff.

A tool to slice long stories into “tweetstorms”? A meme creator that posts directly to Facebook? A tool to prioritise tweets from important friends? What’s going on here?

Dave doesn’t trust major platform vendors an inch. But he’s obviously decided that at this point, you can’t beat ’em. So you’d better join / embrace (and extend) them.

I guess also some of the problems he had with the Fargo server last year are pushing him towards clients to other people’s servers. So faced with a world that insists on using Twitter and Facebook as its transport protocols, the question he’s answering is how to make the authoring tools he wants, sit on top of those protocols.

Update : Dave has a short podcast about them.