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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?"
...it'd become an RFC at some point.
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Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?
Yeah, yeah, the story's about Google, but Slashdot's probably the second most popular website with an RSS feed, and it, um, sucks, to put it bluntly. It's updated infrequently, you're banned if you accidentally load it every 40 minutes instead of every hour, there's only one flat feed for all sections, and so on and so forth. Taco, can you fix your RSS? Setting a good example and all...heck, it's because of Slashdot that we have an additional RSS module!
I do some website development and have actually gone out and looked for decent Atom newsfeeds just out of curiosity. I have never found any (yes I know how to use google, teoma, dogpile, etc...) worthwhile newsfeeds using this standard. Perhaps some of the readers have seen such feeds. I would be very interested to hear of good technical feeds using the Atom standard. Also why Atom? I might be ignorant of what makes Atom a good alternative, RSS seems to work well, but I am new to the scene maybe someone could enlighten me as to why we need the Atom standard.
AC
During the recent call for comments over changing the RSS 2.0 specification, Mark Pilgrim supplied a test case to show that it was a non-backwards-compatible change.
While Dave Winer is supposed to not control the RSS specification, he managed to delete Mark Pilgrim's comments as he has control over the server the comment system runs on.
Mark and Dave don't get on; that's no big secret. But Dave interfered with feedback because of his grudge against Mark. I don't think anybody should claim that RSS is not under Dave's control.
It is often useful for sites which would like to carry news but the primary objective of the site is not news. RSS is a standard way to receive the news from multiple sources and parse it using a standard class or function. An example would be an ISP members section. You could provide news stories or even securityfocus.com announcements updated automatically without any additional labor. This is a benefit to both parties in that it adds value to your site while at the same time drives traffic to the news supplier (hopefully for them increasing ad revenue).
The RSS 2.0 specification is frozen and no new development is allowed under the RSS name. The specification states that any new development must happen in namespaces or in new specifications with new names. Funnily enough, when people actually do that (with Atom, and with "funky" feeds), they are still criticised for it by the people who wrote that part of the spec.
This discussion of Google using RSS for Blogger is all well and good, but what about the broader question of integrating RSS into their mainstream search services? By comparison, Feedster searches RSS, and provides its results in RSS. But to get an RSS feed for a Google search you need to use the 3rd party GoogleAlert. Not to mention that Google recently shut down a third party news-to-RSS service. Aren't the guys from the Googleplex supposed to have technological vision or something?
The "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would coalesce, but then things started to fragment, largely due to Google," Winer said. "RSS deserves Google's respect, and it's not getting it."
Ah yes. Let's translate the first sentence, "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would go my way, but then people started to use a competing syndication system, largely due to Google"
The line about RSS deserving respect from anyone much less Google just cracks me up. Regardless of which is "better," Google made a business decision to focus on one. RSS deserves nothing from Google or anyone else. It's a specification for crying out loud.
Keeping this in mind, let's now translate the second sentence, "I deserve Google's respect, and I'm not getting it."
That sounds about right. If you are so tied to your creation that you cannot seperate yourself from it then you need take a step back, take a deep breath, and avoid making decisions for your baby until it, and you, have matured.
-Adam