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Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-miss-ultramode dept.

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?"

3 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. The weight of Google by Infonaut · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but it would be nice if the clout of the company that dominates search could be used to help a standard rather than hinder it.

    Microsoft, are you watching?

    --
    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
  2. Re:FYI (because I didn't know this) by dindi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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    The feed most likely comes from the same db and as so it is not outdated.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 :)

  3. Re:No one controls RSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)