Attacking Echo

I thought the whole Funky RSS 2.0 was over. With the Echo Project moving right along, and Dave offering an acknowledgement, things seemed to be dying down. Now, I find Dave has linked to this:

But all this is happening because RSS is essentially baked. If you re-open the debate with a project like Echo, you’re sending a strong signal that RSS isn’t ready for prime time—either the technology, or the community around it. And, more importantly, you’re also granting license to other people to do the same thing. One of the beautiful things about RSS is that it can be adopted without question, largely because it just works. What’s to stop some smart guy in a large software company from saying, “there’s no consensus out there, so I’m just going to build my own format.” And if the software company is large enough, lock in happens around that format instead and we’re right back where we started. - Tim Jarrett

Dave’s comments:

Tim Jarrett explains, eloquently, why anyone who uses weblogs and aggregators should be angry as hell when developers try to rip up the pavement, break everything and start over, just when it’s all working so well. The weblog story isn’t about technology anymore, it’s about writers and readers. As I read Tim’s piece I kept thinking, finally, someone has the guts to say it. Bravo Tim. Where do I sign? - Dave Winer

It made me recall someone who was talking about writing not that long ago. If you read what Mark Pilgrim wrote on May 11th, it is rather disappointing to find where we are today. I am not happy to see what is going on, but by doing this now before RSS truly hits critical mass, I think it will prevent the need for something like this happening in the future. Having one vendor control such an important standard is simply not working.

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Looks like you'll have to be the blog of record for that quote, as it's now been edited down, minus the cheering.

I found someone else who quoted from it... On Funky RSS and Arrogance

There's an even better post from Andrew Grumet on the same subject. Linked to from today's Scripting News. If you guys want both sides of the story, check it out. Echo shouldn't have been necessary. If you think it's my fault that no one wanted to work on RSS, you don't understand what's been going on. A lot of people just didn't want to get their hands dirty. Echo forces them to start speaking out. Consider what Jon Udell wrote two days go. There will be more of that as other developers and users start tuning into what's going on. And I will support them, and at the same time I will recommend to UserLand that it support Echo, if and when it reaches closure.

Technology is not linear, you have to cover all the bets. It also is far from a sure thing that Echo doesn't turn out to have all the same problems RSS has. In fact, I'm pretty sure it will. No one will get everything they want. And then it will be up to them to compromise. Now they could do that with RSS right now and save a lot of time. We'll see how it shakes out.

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Attacking Echo

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