Singing for Dinner

Dave Winer gave Yahoo! execs three ideas at a Yahoo! offsite and then blogged them.

1 - Open up Yahoo! search

2 - embrace BitTorrent

3 - P2P Webcasting

Go read the whole thing here.

I have been reading Dave's stuff since the early 90s and have been greatly enriched by his mind over the years.  Thanks Dave.

Anyway, I'd like to riff a bit on #3.  Earlier this week Matt Blumberg, Stephanie Miller (who works at Return Path), Tom Evslin, Kelly Evans (Tom's publisher and daughter) and I all Skyped into a bridge and read a couple chapters of the Hackoff.com story.  Tom recorded the whole thing.  Instant podcast (it will be up shortly).

That was really eye opening. It was brain dead simple to do a conference call, record it, and post it on the Internet. With stuff like iSight, video iChat, video Skype, etc, the same thing is possible with videoconferences as we used to call them.

Dave's right.  This is going to be big.

Comments

[Craig Plunkett]

I would love to see all three happen, but unfortunately, this is the vulnerable chokepoint where ISPs like att and vz and cablevision can kill it. As soon as you crank up a P2P client on a cablevsion connection, your bandwidth is dialed down to a crawl, and here is where Mr. Dolan, Whitacre, and the rest of the gang can extract their pound of flesh. The ISPs are the gatekeepers for the success of this kind of content distribution. Unless they subscribe to NYCwireless' network neutrality principles, or give you what they advertise (the advertised connection speed all the time, no matter what you're running) I don't see that happening.

[Jeffrey McManus]

#1 has already happened. It was actually available at the time Dave wrote what he wrote. See http://developer.yahoo.net/search.

What Dave wants is for our search API to be free of charge to anyone, which is sort of like asking a mobile phone company to make its network free of charge to anyone.