I just finished that project I described last night where I can send mail to an address @lukemelia.com and have the contents of the message sync to my palm via AvantGo. I learned a lot about qmail, as well as the Mail::Internet and Mail::Header perl modules.

It’s really interesting taking advantage of these companies that offer free technology services such as Blogger and AvantGo. It does make me wonder, though, if these services will continue to be free forever.

What incentive does AvantGo really have to help me run my life better and provide palm users access to my blog? Not rhetorical, here are some answers: They have the advantage of free advertising — I’m now more likely to recommend and capable of implementing an AvantGo deal at work now that I’ve done this. They also get more lock-in as the handheld web platform of choice.

For Blogger, I guess it’s similar. They forgo ad revenue on the blogs of users who host their own sites and use Blogger’s FTP publishing. But they get a blogger.com banner on those sites (if the users are honest) and those more sophisticated users are likely to recommend Blogger to newbies who will host on BlogSpot.

But it’s too late for theorizing about Internet business models. That’s so 1999.