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Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard
declan writes "My News.com colleague Evan Hansen just got his hands on an internal email thread revealing that Google is planning to embrace RSS. Evan's co-authored News.com article quotes from the email (sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) confirming that Google is rethinking only supporting Atom. Slashdot covered Google's purchase of Pyra Labs and Blogger.com/Blogspot.com last year that made it a fan of the Atom standard. Does this news mean that RSS is now viewed as out of Dave Winer's control? Will RSS and Atom finally converge?"
Will RSS and Atom finally converge?
HOPE SO! Blogging has moved so fast that the tangled web of RSS protocols is confusing to RSS publishers and users alike.
Far more important than their individual features would be a single standard, so that publi7shing tools could stop bothering about compatibility issues and get on with features people care about.
Only Google has the power to create an RSS standard. Google, you're our only hope!
Microsoft, are you watching?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This is probably a good choice. I mean, the W3C uses RSS to syndicate their page (see the bottom).
As the state, RSS is based on RDF, which is an approved standard.
Based on the coverage at ZDNet, it seems that Yahoo! also goes RSS...
Why would the two merge when so many major players are leaning towards RSS already?
No, they're not "moving towards" an RSS standard. They're merely supporting RSS as well as Atom. Doesn't seem like they're moving towards anything, they're not moving away from Atom.
I don't understand why people want this. It can be out of date for an often-updated site like Slashdot or Fark, and to do anything (i.e., post or read comments) you have to go to the website anyway. I've tried RSS and it's absolutely useless.
That's what an aggregator is for. The idea is that you subscribe to a bunch of feeds, and you are notified when a new story is published. It simply lets you handle more information sources in less time.
No it isn't. Not for me at least. It can be somewhat behind the latests posts, but since I'm not the kind that constantly hits refresh on Slashdot nor Fark, it doesn't matter to me.
The way I use it, I have several sources (a couple of interesting blogs, a book review site, Slashdot, Fark, etc), it then refreshes every 30 minutes, and I can keep track on new posts from a single location. If I see an interesting article on one of the sites, then I go to the actual web page.
Plus, my RSS reader is inobtrusive enough that noone can see I'm actually monitoring goof-off sites.
No sig
Out of sync ? LATE ?
...
:)
People! Your aggregator might be out of sync, not the website RSS feed.
If you update the sources every 5 minutes it is still better than reloading the whole site every 5 minutes (and some sites have update time policies eg every 10 mins)
The feed most likely comes from the same db and as so it is not outdated.
Useful ? well if you use a PDA over a GPRS link, it is really cool to have just headlines that consume a few bytes, instead of loading 20 websites with all the ads and gfx (could be megabytes)
I think it is a cool thing, and even if you do not have a decent aggregator you can sed and grep and awk it to assemble a desired format
just my 1cent opinion
bored developers of course !, it wouldnt be computer programming if we didnt keep re-inventing the wheel
Dave is historicaly a pain in the ass. FreeSoftware/OpenSource should be able to get around ego centric pains in the ass, so let it be with RSS.
Bye Bye Dave
-tomwsmf
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
If you're implementing your own parser, sure. The inconsistency gets problematic when you're trying to use software written by someone else to connect to software written by a third person.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?
Stop lying by saying it is not?
The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.
Yes, it is under a Creative Commons license. So what? perl is GPL'd, but no one would say p5p doesn't control it. Sure, there's some slight difference in the case of true ownership, but the real difference is that there is a recognized body that everyone looks to, and that body was created by Dave, and is controlled in no small measure by Dave.
The fact is that anyone who tries to improve upon or modify RSS is met with Dave's wrath. And this is precisely why Atom exists. There can never be convergence because Dave is still involved, and -- as evidence by the fact that he has several times over several years said he would no longer be invovled, but still is -- he likely forever will be.
I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.
If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.
It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).
actually that's a great idea. A 500 LB gorilla like google could really serve to keep all the big players honest! Google has nothing to loose by adopting web standards and everything to gain. MS key bargining chip is OS integration...If Google tries to play in that space they will loose. They need to ensure they create their own space to play in. Open and vocal endorcement of W3C standards as well as implementing them to the fullest is one way google can keep the playing field level. Their Primary market is internet searching...not web services...but keeping MS from fragmenting that market is a very important goal. Even MS is not big enough to deliberately break Google in IE... the uproar would be huge!
Roger, here's what you have to do to convince people that RSS isn't controlled by Dave Winer:
-- Document and disclose the process for choosing members of the advisory board. Who issues the invitations? Who decides who to invite to be a member? If a member quits, who decides who will fill the empty slot?
-- Enlarge the board so that Dave has to convince more than one person in order to get his way.
-- Get people on the board who are not perceived by the public, correctly or incorrectly, as being Dave's cronies. It would be especially useful to get someone with technical stature in the business who has not been involved in the controversy.
-- Eventually, convince Dave to retire from the board. The "Charles Goldfarb" factor is real, and a lot of people will just not participate if it means interacting with Dave, however unfair or irrational that feeling may be.
(Comments similar to this post have been deleted by Dave from his message board.)
I am not a blogger but I have been a reader of weblogs for a while now, (I have used many aggregators and have settled on Bloglines a web-based aggregator that is awesome with a tabbing browser like Firefox.) I have been following the Atom/RSS dispute for a while but have never seen the answer to the following question: What does this syndication war mean to me as an end user?
A few others in this thread have asked a similar question but the answer always seems to do with how its beneficial to the blogger or content provider. Now this is important of course but as a geek I have learned to be wary of such arguments, the first time I fell for it I ended up with blinking text in my browser. Maybe I'm too cynical but I'm comfortable being cautious and indeed a little skeptical of the latest and greatest technological innovations.
That being said: What will Atom do for me, Joe Blogreader, that the defacto standard RSS does not? Feeds and aggregators have changed how I use the net, my bookmarks menu has shrunk significantly and I'm on fewer mailing lists. What does Atom have to offer ME that I should bug my content providers to offer Atom feeds in addition to or in place of RSS?
Here's a semi complete article on Atom and RDF / Semantic Web.
Basically, one XML format or another doesn't quite matter in the long run - however, if something is expressed as RDF/XML in the first place, it saves having to do some transformation work.
For those that don't know, RSS isn't just for news. As RDF, RSS can import relations and data from any other RDF vocab - ie you can extend a news article to have a geographical location, you can define who an author is in FOAF - or better still, if an article is about someone, that can be done in FOAF too.
Vocabularies like DAML+OIL take it one step further too - so you can infer relations that are not explicitly mentioned. IE, you can say "all children have fathers, all wives have husbands, so if Linda is married to my father, she is my mother." Of course you have to specify childOf parentOf marriedTo relations, and their inverse's, but you get the vague idea.
With Atom expressed as RDF we can combine both RSS and Atom to create a document with meaning beyond the bounds of one format.
This isn't a one or the other case - both thrive to fill deficiencies in each other...
As I've said elsewhere: The difference between a completed technical standard placed under the Creative Commons and a truly open one is the difference between being allowed to scribble over the President's name in the newspaper and being able to vote for his opponent in the first place.
I could take the CC-licensed RSS spec and change it however I wanted, and it wouldn't help things one bit because it wouldn't be an accepted standard any further than my own hard drive. It would just be another incompatible spec calling itself RSS 2.0 that developers have to deal with.
RSS is being used as a way to broadcast a notification that something has changed. You post a new article to a site, and all the people who have subscribed to your RSS feed get notified.
But RSS is a polling mechanism.
I'd much rather see something like the IRC protocol or NNTP used, where the publisher posts one message and it propagages through a network of servers to everyone interested. The way it is now, if a million people subscribe to your RSS feed, that's a million aggregators polling every 15 minutes. Ouch.