Sharon Housley, the marketing director for FeedForAll, wants to convince you that Atom is dead. Why? Because FeedForAll can’t do Atom. In fact, FeedForAll can’t do RSS 1.0 either. They coded themselves in a corner, and now they’re stuck. That’s a shame, because they have a decent product for creating RSS feeds.

In this position, most companies would roll up their sleeves, do some painful refactoring, and add support for RSS 1.0 and Atom. But since deception is usually cheaper, Housley and FeedForAll have decided to just convince people that Atom is dead & long live RSS. (Oh, and just not mention RSS 1.0.)

In August, Housley made the bogus proclamation on Slashdot that RSS has “won” the syndication “battle”:

“Microsoft’s inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn’s coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification.”

Say what? At least one month before Housley’s proclamation, Microsoft made this announcement:

“Atom support was checked in by John Lueders (one of the developers on the team). That’s both 0.3 and 1.0 (based on the -09 spec) support. That check-in completes Longhorn support for the different syndication formats. The grand total is: RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0. “

Where, o coffin, is thy nail?

Unfortunately, this same syndicated “announcement” has been picked up and repeated again and again and again and again and - as of yesterday - again.

Another famous marketing person coined this phrase: “If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.” Just Google “nail in the coffin of the Atom specification” to see how well Housley’s tactics are faring. Many a marketing blog has parroted her without checking the facts.

Atom 1.0 just came out in July. Of course it doesn’t have user base that RSS 2.0. Maybe it will take off, maybe it won’t. But it isn’t up to FeedForAll, who is stuck in RSS 2.0, to declare the winner. They are supposed to be building software, not propaganda.

Late-Day Update: The previous version of this entry had a section that accused Housley of repeatedly re-posting the same content. Ben Cochran pointed out that it is possible that syndication channels were simply picking up and re-posting her article with a new publication date. I can’t prove that one way or the other, but I have reworded this entry accordingly. The point isn’t how Housley’s stuff has been spread around, the point is that it is wrong.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 17:28 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.