Web X.0

Wishlist - Gmail-type auto-save everywhere

More and more I find myself writing on web-based applications. Examples - blog posts like this one, company wiki entries, web-based mail, etc, etc.

The risk of losing my work is pretty significant: either by browser crash, windows freezing, dropped internet connection, expired session, involuntary Windows update (urgh!!), etc.

Gmail's auto-save functionality is excellent, and I'm not sure why they seem to be the only ones doing it...I guess there's some real technical difficulty involved.

If so, it would really be great for some web 2.0, AJAXy company to come up with a licenseable version of auto-save functionality similar to that in Gmail. It seems like a large number of apps are going to need this in the next few years...

[update] Ironically, I lost this post twice while writing it on TypePad via a wireless connection. TypePad must have very sophisticated content detection algorithms that kill any item hinting at potential shortcomings it has...

[update #2] I lost this post for the 3rd time. I'm starting to think my conspiracy theories above might actually be true... so I'm not sure this post will ever see the light of day.

[updated #3] OK - it's got to be a conspiracy... TypePad isn't going to support auto-save, and they don't want you to be aware of this problem. Furthermore, they seem to be very aggresive about blocking any mention of this... I can't seem to be able to hack their system to publish this post!! It's usually so easy with posts on 'regular' subjects... last attempt...

Wishlist: The State of the Feedosphere

I'm starting a wishlist of features/products/whatever I'd like to see coming from other companies.

#1 is for FeedBurner -
David Sifry of Technorati has done a great job reporting the estimated size of the blogosphere with their 'State of the Blogosphere' reports.

While those reports are great, they only shed light on the creation of blog media, but very little on the consumption of it.

It seems like FeedBurner, being a de-facto monopoly in blog feed syndication, is in a unique position to report on the consumption of blog content via RSS readers. I'm sure a bunch of people playing in this space would be very interested in knowing the approximate size of this market, and especially its growth over time (is mainstream adopting feeds or not?).

The only seemingly serious report I am aware of estimating the size of the RSS market is this one by Yahoo, but it seems like it's based more on anecdotal evidence (awareness surveys, etc) than on actual subscription data which FeedBurner has access to.