Engineering Strategies

Authored by Michael Pate on May 10th, 2004 at 10:52 AM

Once upon a time, there was relative peace in the Syndication world. Then this statement was made.

The thing that Blogger and MT currently call RSS is not only not what UserLand does but it isn’t even an improvement over what UserLand does. - Dave Winer

Eventually, a solution developed.

Sam Ruby and friends have been working on a new format and API for content syndication and editing. - Jason Shellen

Rather than do RSS incorrectly, Blogger has chosen to offer Atom exclusively to new users. Of course, with both Feedburner and 2RSS.com offering RSS to Atom translation services, I don’t really see where the need for an RSS offering exists.

The only aggregator that I know of that offers no Atom support is Radio Userland. And judging from the stance of a former key employee, I think we can assume it will not be included anytime soon.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if the non-support for Atom in Radio Userland is “a strategic issue” or “an engineering issue?”

—

I wasn’t aware of the issue with Legacy Readers that is pointed out below. I would have thought most of the people technically adept enough to be into RSS would be the kind of people who updated to the latest versions. But then I never said that doing an RSS to Atom conversion was not a potentially useful service.

—

Dan Gillmore is hosting a related discussion.

Comments

Hey Michael, there are actually a bunch of feed readers that don't support Atom, in many cases the legacy versions of readers that do now support Atom (eg, Feed Demon 1.0 does not but the new beta does). A surprising number of these legacy readers are still being used. Now obviously, that issue goes away over time, but we are also now seeing mobile readers that want truncated versions of feeds, picture only readers that serve as screen savers, etc. So it will be interesting to see if the innovation and quest for a common standard reach some sort of happy equilibrium.

Having said this, I agree with your post; the protocol should ultimately disappear from the publisher's radar as a set of sophisticated tools emerge to manage syndication, no matter what the transport format.

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