Eye on Winer

Dave Winer tweets:

Yes. Once the permissions are set correctly it appears in the feed. Of course when I clicked on the RSS icon I got an Atom feed. Broken.

Twitter launched a redesign yesterday that adopts Atom in preference to RSS. If you visit a user page and click the RSS autodiscovery icon in the status bar, you will see two Atom feeds as the available options. Previously, you’d see two Atom feeds and two RSS feeds offering the exact same data.

This change is, of course, an improvement.

Winer is, of course, wrong when he describes this as broken. The only breakage here is in his thinking.

Dave Winer hates FeedBurner, the feed publishing and stat tracking service bought by Google last year for $100 million, as he showed in this recent mopey Twitter update:

i’ll get flamed for this, but that’s how i felt about feedburner. never even said hello, much less thanks.

Because he hates FeedBurner, Winer linked to a weblog post yesterday accusing the service of playing favorites to benefit Google Reader over the competition. The charge was bogus and quickly refuted.

This is just the latest example of Winer spreading disingenuous bullshit, FUD and outright paranoia about the company.

Why he expects to be thanked for this remains a mystery.

There are so many things wrong with today’s post on Feedburner that I scarcely know where to begin.

Feedburner reports that 609K people subscribe to the TechCrunch feed.

When I got a prominent link from a TechCrunch piece on September 30, it generated 228 hits (according to Google Analytics). Now it could be there was some other reason less than 1 in 1000 of the readers clicked on the link, or it may be that these sources are over-reporting the influence of TechCrunch.

Assuming that he’s telling the truth… so what? This site received a “prominent link” from Dave a few months ago and it generated about a half-dozen hits. It took me a few days to even notice it in the stats. All that means is that his readers either aren’t particularly interested in what he linked to (based on how he ’sold’ it) or they’re already reading. But you can count on Dave to take any scintilla of tenuously linked evidence to try to tear down someone he doesn’t like. In this case, he’s clearly miffed that 1) he dropped on the Leaderboard a few days ago and 2) Arrington then (correctly) accused him of spamming TechMeme.

He then talks about the perverse incentives to link to TechCrunch. Two problems here. First, he’s been saying for a long time (and he’s right) that the whole IDEA of the web is to send people away. There are already non-altruistic motivations for linking out, so pointing them out (and then acting like this is big news) is highly disingenuous — except that the Winer Double Standard applies: when something helps him or people he likes, it’s good and right — when that same thing helps people he doesn’t like, it’s wrong and needs fixing.

Second, is this passage (emphasis mine):

Since Arrington’s pieces tend to rise to the top of the page, pieces that link to them become more visible (they show up in the Discussion links), and the chances that another blogger is going to point to them go up. All it takes is one or two of those pointers to promote your piece to the top level, and that really boosts your visibility, and now that the Leaderboard is there, it could make that status semi-permanent, creating an even greater incentive to point. So people can and do, at least sometimes, point to TechCrunch not because they think one of their pieces is worthy of a comment for its own sake, rather because it gives them status and flow, and if they’re running ads on their site, money

There’s a pretty good probability that this is the case, that people in fact do point to TechCrunch to ride its coattails onto TechMeme… but does he have any proof of that? I sincerely doubt it — unless he’s the one doing it.

Hmm.

A few days ago, Dave posted an entry entitled “Yet Another Feedburner Problem.” I’m not sure what the other problems were, but this is yet another serious non-issue.

Apparently you can game the Feedburner stats and counters… you know… in much the same way that you can game regular website stats and counters.

The real question is… who cares?

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.