Eye on Winer

Did I miss the transition period? Dave says today that he trusts Google. My first reaction was puzzlement. After all, for all of the FUD he spews, it seems odd for him to now talk about how much he trusts them.

No worries, though, this was another FUD piece talking in the abstract about Feedburner “breaking” feeds. Let’s call a spade a spade here. What he’s really talking about, again, is Feedburner starting to output ATOM feeds instead of RSS. He writes:

Even though I don’t choose to use Feedburner, because I subscribe to the feeds of people who do, I am effected when they change the format of their feeds. When Google does this they inevitably break products that compete with theirs, the most obvious being Google Reader, but there are also server-side products that compete with Google’s that depend on being able to read RSS feeds.

There is exactly one feed reader of which I am aware that does not support ATOM. I bet you can guess which one that is: the one Dave wrote himself and absolutely refuses to add ATOM support to. Every other major (and probably minor) feed reader handles both RSS and ATOM perfectly well.

This, as I’ve written before, is the problem. Feedburner could eliminate RSS feeds and nobody but Dave would notice.

Now, amazingly, it seems as if Google may be doing this. I’ve seen it myself, files that mysteriously change format and break apps and users, and I’ve heard about it from a couple of developers. No one has said anything publicly, that I know of.

Small correction: this doesn’t “break apps”, applications that don’t support ATOM are already broken. Further, I’m not sure what it means to break a user (a phrase Dave uses twice), but he doesn’t spare the hyperbole and FUD:

Will someday I look in my spreadsheet files and find that Google has changed the numbers? Or will emails from execs at Yahoo contain racial slurs or outright lies? See how much damage Google can do because we trust them?

That’s right, Dave. Choosing not to support an inferior (and waning) file format is exactly the same as violating privacy agreements and maliciously destroying user data. Exactly the same.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm and is filed under ATOM, Dave, Feedburner, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.