The Life and Times of the Watters Family

Enter The RSS Ninja

Adam Curry: “[Google] is betting its future and shareholders money with a plan has historically been proven to fail. That is sad.”

Adam is referring, here, to Googles support for ATOM. There are so many things wrong with this, that I’m not entirely sure where to begin.

I’ll start with the apparent premise:

The future of syndication technology is being destroyed by the rise of thousands of incompatible, closed, proprietary formats.

Umm, if we give RSS fans the benefit of the doubt and consider the entire RSS 0.91-2.0 lineage a single format, we’re only talking about three formats, not thousands, three. All three are at least semi-open. Ironically, the least open of the formats is RSS 2.0, the format Adam et al are fighting for, but I digress.

As for the formats themselves: None of the three are overly complicated. None of the three rely on closed, proprietary software to generate them. All three are easier to understand than HTML.

The debate doesn’t even appear to be about the relative technical merits of the actual formats anymore. The argument, as I understand it is this: RSS 2.0 (via its ancestors) was here first, therefore, it should stay while the others go. RSS 2.0 advocates have virtually ignored the concerns of the other players in this technology space. If there is to be a debate, let’s have it be about formats, not some twisted attempt to socially engineer the dominance of a particular format by attempting to convince the undecided that the whole movement will fail if we don’t quickly rally around RSS 2.0. That’s just slimy.

And then there’s the part about Google basing their future on this. Huh?!? I thought Google was basing their future on search technologies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I really don’t see Google’s search business going down the tubes because they didn’t get behind RSS 2.0. Ego-check time.

And finally, there is this RSS Yakuza business. You ninja might start by cutting out the FUD.

---

---