Examples of Dave’s double standards (one for him, one for everyone else) are easy to come by. Few are as stark as his recent crusade against the hegemony of twitter follow suggestions. Rogers Cadenhead fills us in on an interesting back story, for those who didn’t already know it: Dave sold default subscriptions in Radio.
I wasn’t on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn’t in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why — he secretly paid Winer $10,000:
Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I’ve been delighted with my purchase and although I haven’t checked recently, I’m pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. …
The $10k didn’t ‘just’ give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I’ve built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.
So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.