From the DF Archive: ‘Is That a Podcast in Your Pocket?’

Yours truly, back in 2005, on Apple’s initial foray into supporting podcasting in iTunes and on iPods:

The other bit of good fortune is the name: podcasting. Good fortune for Apple, at least. Clearly the “pod” in “podcasting” is about the iPod. Apple couldn’t have come up with a better name for this phenomenon if they’d gotten to choose it themselves. If the whole “audio enclosures via RSS” scene were still known as “audioblogging”, as it was when Maciej Ceglowski recorded his seminal “Audioblogging Manifesto”, I seriously wonder whether Apple would have done this now.

It’s been a long seven years. At the time, Apple’s introduction of podcasting support in iTunes effectively took the market from Ev Williams’s startup Odeo. Odeo (wisely) abandoned their original idea, and instead focused its efforts on a social messaging network instead: Twitter.

Would Twitter exist today if Apple hadn’t added podcast support to iTunes in 2005?

★ Tuesday, 26 June 2012