Contact with Google.

I have been emailing with David Krane, a PR person at Google, who works alongside Cindy McCaffery. That's good. He had emailed me an invite to use Gmail in the first wave of invites, but my very crude spam system coughed it up, and then hurled his follow-up email. Once I knew it was there and got back from Europe I tried to use it, only to find out that the invite had expired. Over the weekend David very kindly set me up with a new one, and now I have an empty Gmail account, dave.winer. Obviously it's not going to be much use until it starts getting some email, so send me a message if you feel so inclined.

As noted yesterday, it was disappointing that the new Blogger interface, which looks quite nice, doesn't support RSS 2.0. I'm far from the only one who's commenting. It would be so easy to do, so not evil, so grown-up, so much appreciated if they would just do it. Pretty soon RSS is going to be known as the format of the BigPubs, which is totally ironic because I'm one of the original bloggers. Come on guys, what if I say please? Please, I'm down on bended knees.

Another note, I now have four different logins at Google: Orkut, AdSense, Blogger and Gmail. Each with a different username and password. Now here's an area where Google could be a leader, provide an alternative to Passport, something we really need, a Google-size problem.

Both user interfaces, Gmail and the new Blogger are very slick, but Gmail is the more sophisticated. Those guys should get busy with blogging, if they're not already working on a blogging interface. And don't be surprised when Google announces a centralized aggregator a la Bloglines (hopefully not with a three-pane interface). That will be Microsoft's cue to release announce theirs, and we're off to the races. (I bet Sun buys Bloglines.) That's why it's so incredibly important that the format coalesce now before it becomes a basis for competition, like the browser wars of the 1990s. That's why I'm beggin. (Of course, with the great running start RSS has, this could be the final act for the Tech industry. Imagine if the users told them to get with the program or die. That would be very very cool.)

[Scripting News]