OK, bite dust Peter, for getting it wrong.

This is from an email exchange with Steve Chen (Youtube founder who is now filthy rich) in June 2005. He pinged me about Youtube (I was running Mefeedia at the time) and I criticized their service for not being open about their business model.

Me: “Thanks for taking criticism so well :) You’re right, there are lots of new players. Most won’t last though. I’m looking forward to see how you guys do and what features you come up with. Let’s stay in touch.”

What’s more though, in the following emails we discussed syndication and I helped them figure out (together with Josh who was working on ANT then) how to support the mediaRSS extensions in their RSS feeds and specifically add a file extension (.swf) which made my work easier and to add RSS2.0 enclosures.

Me: “Both ANT and Mefeedia (and probably other future aggregators) support RSS2.0 enclosures, not the media:player element. So could you add this to the feed (with the mime type and whatever the length is)?”

Steve: (few emails later) “Yes!  Finally!  We went through a lot of iterations with getting this right.  Now it’s moving on to tackling REST and MetaWeblog API. :)”

So a bit of history there, I think I got Steve Chen to add enclosures to the Youtube RSS feeds :) I had totally forgotten that until today Facebook asked if I wanted to be Steve Chen’s friend. Actually, I remember meeting him in a bar in NYC and disussing the option of going to London to work with Youtube, but that may be a false memory (may have been someone else).