Some readers aren’t clear on why it’s hypocritical as hell for Dave Winer to invent a new HTTP header to lock out other applications from accessing the photo RSS feeds used by FlickrFan. Winer’s fearmongering about FeedBurner should make the point clear. Last year, in one of his efforts to spread FUD against Google’s feed publishing service, Winer wrote:
… if Google ties Feedburner to Google Reader that still hurts people like me, because my feed doesn’t work as well with Google Reader.
Now let’s take a deeper look at “doesn’t work as well.”
It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.
The ability of one user to opt out would do absolutely nothing to stop or even diminish the negative effects of monopolistic tying. And users show no inclination to do anything for the benefit of the Internet as a whole, so there’s no reason to believe any of them would withhold their support of Feedburner just because it screws with the benefits of a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem. Certainly not enough to persuade Google not to tie the two products.
Several programmers used Winer’s new RSS feeds to display photos without FlickrFan, either because they don’t use Macs or because OPML Editor runs like ass. Those programs don’t work at all now. Winer’s belief in a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem only applies to other people.
Remember that the next time he complains about being locked in a trunk.
