Android Developer Blog, Back From the Dead?

Well, now, this is a pleasant surprise!

The Android Developer Blog was a quiet, sleepy little blog. An announcement or two, a few posts around major releases, and not much else. This was a wasted resource, IMHO, and I expressed that opinion on more than one occasion.

It is possible – just possible, mind you – that this prayer was answered.

Tim Bray seems to have grabbed the blog by the horns, with his “More Blogginess” post. This is a good thing, as he not only writes well himself, but he theoretically should be empowered enough to give the blog more momentum. That certainly seems to be his plan:

This space has been used mostly in a just-the-facts press-release-flavored way and, while that’s been useful, I thought it could be livelier. Because, even after only a few weeks’ exposure to what’s going on here, I’ve discovered that there are a ton of interesting Android stories, and while some of them probably have to be secrets, there are more than enough we can tell to crank up the interest level here.

And, hot on the heels of his post, Dianne Hackborn added a writeup of “Multitasking the Android Way”. While that didn’t seem to cover much new ground for those of you who (cough) subscribe to my books, it’s certainly great material to have on the site.

Now, we’ve seen pulses of activity before, and now would seem like a likely time for them, given a presumed impending Android release. I can only hope that Mr. Bray can indeed keep the momentum going. As Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great, success is a flywheel – you have to keep turning that wheel, even if it is slow going at the outset, because the momentum you build is the key to keeping the wheel turning.