Happy 5th Birthday!

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From: Rohit Khare (rohit@KnowNow.com)
Date: Sun Dec 24 2000 - 23:32:54 PST


Five years ago, a lonely Rohit sitting at the office on Christmas Eve
decided that it was too much trouble to be forwarding interesting bits
to various folks by hand. 23,436 archived postings later, I can see
that many assorted utensils beyond myself have grown in their own
ways.

Now, I can't say that five years later I have all that much better to
do on a holiday evening than hang out on /dev/null twiddling sendmail
config files.

On the other hand, the "office" is considerably nicer, mainly by dint
of it being my own, rather than MIT's. The downside, though, is that I
used to work for a great guy and insightful mentor, Tim
Berners-Lee. Now I work for this bumbling Indian egomaniac :-)

Personally, I'd never have quite imagined I'd have succeeded with Adam
in taking it as far as we have. We'll have a lot more to say next
year, but for now, I'll note that it's been a month of being 26, and
things are looking a hell of a lot brighter than they did at 25...

For the last few days, I've been toying with shuting down FoRK. Today
seems like an appropriate moment. I am about to be thrust forward upon
a stage that no longer brooks long, brooding midnight posts. It's been
years since the last VoIDpost, for example. And yet, however
"successful" I might be so far, it's not nearly enough success to
qualify for what Charles Ferguson so trenchantly termed "tenure in
life". So I'll have to leave the soul-baring, frank-to-the-point-of-
toasty, real-time software-CEO brain-dump thing to Dave Winer :-)

It would, however, be the easy way out to merely shut FoRK off.

Instead, I'd like it to transmogrify into a vast series of private
subspaces reflecting the deconstruction of everyone's own FoRK. We're
working on some new real-time information sharing systems that span
buddy-list communities across email, IM, and the web. Blogging is too
public; editing this page is too centralized. The day that system
passes my sniff-test, it'll finally be a chance to see if "the dogs
eat the dog food".

So congratulations on another year without mailing-list software, XeNT!

Happy Holidays,
  Rohit Khare
  CEO, KnowNow Inc.
  2730 Sand Hill Road
  Suite 150
  Menlo Park, CA 94025
  (650) 561 0246 (direct)
  (206) 465 4936 (cell)


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