When does it become a bad idea to not handle the competition’s format?

Dave Winer, the creator of RSS 2.0 and Radio Userland’s RSS Aggregator, chides a friend for switching from RSS to Atom:

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved…. I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask — why?? Do you want to lose subscribers?

The position he’s taking, of course, is that there is no practical reason to use Atom (if there were, his own Radio Userland software would support it). Now he’s put himself out on a ledge where he has to ask people to stay on RSS, rather than just support Atom.

Let’s face it, support for both formats isn’t just commonplace, it is expected. To whit:

James Roberson notes:

Dave Winer must be the only guy on the planet with a newsreader that can’t handle Atom.

The comments on Roberson’s post are growing, but here are a few telling tidbits:

Rogers Cadenhead: I’m not aware of any newsreader outside of Radio UserLand and Manila that doesn’t support Atom 1.0

Asbjørn Ulsberg: The only reason Dave can’t read Atom feeds is because his software doesn’t support it. And the reason it doesn’t is politically based, not technically.

Elliotte Rusty Harold: Sooner or later they’ll upgrade when more and more of the feeds they want to aggregate are no longer available in RSS.

Dave, I think it’s time to rethink your position. If your goal is to provide software that is useful to people, why not handle the Atom format gracefully? Heck, even Microsoft Word can read other document formats. That doesn’t mean Redmond is admitting defeat, it just means good software is flexible, and there might be something other than .doc out there.

Like it or not, Atom 1.0 exclusivity is growing. Why not give yourself and your users a chance to read the content, even if you don’t like the package it comes in?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:49 and is filed under syndication, rss, atom, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.