I went to see a presentation at SDForum’s Emerging Technology SIG just a little while after JotSpot launched. Joe Kraus spoke about the long tail of software development, and how trends like situated software pointed to there being room for lots of small applications with small groups of users. He compared the curve of potential number of applications to number of users for those applications with the curve of search queries to Excite and the number of people running them. I think everyone is familiar with the long tail analogy by now, but back then it was still sinking in for a lot of us. Lots of people look at me like I have two heads when I try to describe the fact that JotSpot is going after the long tail of software development - maybe I was describing it wrong. Now I have something else to point people to however, cause that presentation is now online. It’s probably a good viewpoint to read over for anyone doing web software development, no matter where you stand on the whole “long tail” theory.