Eye on Winer

As he’s telling Yahoo to sell to Microsoft, Dave Winer sneaks in his favorite advice:

Turn Yahoo into The RSS Powerhouse in every way. Build all new systems around RSS. If it isn’t RSS it doesn’t fly.

Winer frequently asserts that companies can change their fortunes by adopting RSS, and by RSS he means RSS 2.0 and not Atom like those donkey fuckers at Google.

Yahoo went bigger into RSS the past decade than anybody. The company has millions of users subscribing to RSS headlines on My Yahoo, developers remixing RSS on Yahoo Pipes, and millions more reading thousands of RSS feeds produced by its various properties. It also taught RSS to many people through its Publisher’s Guide to RSS, created the popular MediaRSS namespace, joined the RSS Advisory Board and embraced podcasting with the now-dead Yahoo Podcasts portal.

Yahoo already is an RSS powerhouse. Maybe it helped, but embracing RSS clearly wasn’t enough to keep Wall Street happy and avoid its current troubles.

When it comes to thinking about RSS, Winer’s brain is stuck in the Wayback Machine where RSS is an unproven commodity and people are still using XML icons and coffee mugs to subscribe to feeds.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Dave, Microsoft, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.