s l a m: "From a security conscious sysadmin p.o.v., it is a mixed blessing though. The mechanism built into Frontier that makes Radio and any Frontier Tool autoupdate a snap (thanks so much UserLand :-) makes it also the ideal Trojan horse.

If UserLand (in Radio's case) or eVectors (in activeRenderer's case) get compromised by evil minded no-goodniks, they have unlimited access to your workstation, with an active connection to the Internet. Yumm."

Marc Barrot is right, security with Radio tools could become an issue, especially as the installed base will grow. As it is today, Radio could potentially host dangerous tools (yes Marc, I'm reading your mail now ;). Besides trying to make updating servers relatively secure (which is something that we are taking quite seriously), there could actually be the risk of having malicious tools distributed from any source.

Since I was blaming Microsoft only a few days ago about the sourge of the most recent worm, I think we should also make sure that the same should not happen with Radio.

A way to make things a little safer could be to make Radio's www folder its sandbox, and making sure that any access outside that folder is authorized by the user. Just an idea...

1. Create an rss feed to announce news, webservices and tools for Radio UserLand;
2. Develop APIs for the updates system to allow an easy interop with e-commerce applications (already digging...)

Notice to Radio users uploading their weblogs via ftp: if your home page on the server suddenly becomes an empty html file, and your events page reports Can't upstream because "Can't find a sub-table named "6008"." (where the number can be any number), most probably your server's hard disk is full

With many of them there have been very interesting discussions and at least three ideas for new tools that could be developed.

On the marketing side there's an interesting message by Ralph Hempel about the minimum size of a tool. There might be some tools doing just one little thing, but a little better than Radio itself. Is there a market for such tools?

I guess that since this is a completely new market we'll have to find answers ourselves.

The user base is the most important issue to consider: with a very large community, I think that there could be a market for let's say "micro-tools", tools that enhance some specific features of Radio for a very low cost.

With a smaller base (as we have today) it would probably make more sense to create "utility tools" that pack together a set of tools.

One of the main reasons we want to set up this centralized registration system is also to be able to gather and share at least some information on how this market is moving. UserLand could also help sharing their POV. John?.