Dave Winer has been writing a lot this week about the importance of developer communities and of supporting developers. On the other hand, he has completely ignored the release of Conversant, which is an application that runs on top of Frontier/Radio.
Maybe I missed all of the other Frontier/Radio developers who released a content management/groupware package developed with Frontier, but it seems odd that Winer would not want to highlight just the sort of thing that can be done with Frontier/Radio.
Unless, of course, Winer no longer considers Frontier/Radio to be a developer platform. I suspect this is close to the truth.
Winer complains about how Apple ignored developers when it came to things like scripting in order to go with Apple’s own internal products. Similarly, it does not take a genius to note a problem when Manila costs $899 while Radio+Conversant can be had for $540. No, Manila and Conversant do not occupy the same space — Manila is more geared to people who want basic weblog/discussion group functionality, whereas Conversant is geared toward people and groups who want that, plus a whole host of other features such as the e-mail interface, metadata, the ability to mimic a traditional non-dynamic site, advanced templating options, etc.
Regardless of the reason, Winer’s silence is a bit puzzling from someone who relentlessly champions small developers. Microsoft buys a couple companies with “great developer communities” and that’s news, but someone releases an amazing piece of software built on top of Winer’s platform and it’s a non-event. What’s that about.