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Podcast App Breaker Adds Support For JSON Feed, Believes the RSS Alternative Could Benefit Podcast Ecosystem (medium.com)
Erik Michaels-Ober, the creator of popular podcast app Breaker: The decentralized structure of podcasts creates a chicken-and-egg problem for JSON Feed to gain adoption. There's no incentive for podcasters to publish in JSON Feed as long as podcast players don't support it. And there's no incentive for podcast players to support JSON Feed as long as podcasters don't publish in that format. Breaker is hoping to break that stalemate by adding support for JSON Feed in our latest release. As far as we know, Breaker is the first podcast player to do so. Unlike other features that differentiate Breaker, we encourage our competitors to follow our lead in this area. The sooner all podcast players support JSON Feed, the better positioned the entire podcast ecosystem will be for the decades to come. JSON is more compact than XML, making it faster for computers to transfer and parse, while making it easier for humans to read and write. Updating Breaker to support JSON Feed was fun and easy. It took us less than a day from when we started working on it to when the change was submitted to the App Store. Update: Julian Lepinski, creator of Cast (an app that offers the ability to record, edit, publish and host podcast files), announced on Tuesday: Like a lot of software, much of Cast's internal data is stored in JSON, and publishing JSON data directly would be pretty straightforward as a result. So I sunk my teeth in, and in about half a day I'd added experimental JSON Feed support to podcasts published with Cast.
Hey, I'm the one who submitted the story a few days back. I am neither the creator of the format, nor do I have no relation to the guys who created JSON Feed, nor do I have any relation to whoever submitted this summary today. Check my comment history. I'm just a guy who's been around Slashdot for way too long and thought it was weird that this format I was seeing reported everywhere else for an entire week hadn't yet been reported on Slashdot. While I had heard of the two guys behind JSON Feed prior to its announcement, I don't know either of them personally or professionally; I don't follow either of them via blogs, podcasts, Twitter, or anything else; and I don't have any vested interests in the format, other than liking that we finally have some movement in that space. Believe me or not. It's no skin off my nose.
As for the replies to the story, frankly, most of the replies were clearly from people, such as yourself, who hadn't bothered following the links I provided, since they latched onto the incorrect notion that it's just a reimplementation of RSS in JSON. I'll grant that I should've done a better job of making it clear that wasn't the case in my summary (also worth noting: I simply wouldn't have submitted the (non-)story if all it was was RSS in JSON), and I think it's unfortunate that the name of the format is "JSON Feed", since that seems to be driving much of the confusion, but there IS more to it than just "wannabe-rss-replacement-in-json", which you'd know if you had actually read any of the stuff I linked.
Not that I expected you or anyone else to do so, of course. After all, this is still Slashdot, and no one here reads the articles. ;)
XML didn't kill RSS Feeds. Switching to JSON isn't going to help it either. What is killing RSS Feeds? It is the big social media data silos. Facebook, Google+, maybe Twitter.
Facebook is the 200lbs elephant in the room so I'll point to them. Instead of letting end-users select what RSS feeds / 'subscriptions' they wanted to add to their timeline, Facebook made their own non-standardize API that that content authors need to work with in order to let the end-users access the content the way they want. Google+ did the same thing. This takes time and energy from the content creators which is a limited resource. Instead of building an RSS aggregator in to their social media site, those companies decided to create custom APIs that can only be used with 'their' social media site. All of these moves are to get you consuming on their site and not how you'd want consume it.
No good deed goes unpunished.