Responding to my post on RSS and Atom, Robert Scoble writes, "where‰Ûªs the Atom publishing tool and aggregator that demonstrates Atom‰Ûªs superiority?"
And you know what? Scoble is absolutely right to ask that. Even more so when he says that "users don‰Ûªt care about specs, or arguments about formats."
The truth is, until we create the features that touch real people, it doesn't really matter whether or not we use RSS, Atom, RDF, or heck, CSV to syndicate our content.
RSS really is good enough for the bulk of the blogging community. And it is hell of a lot better than what we had before.
Besides, if RSS was not sufficient for blogging, then there wouldn't be umteen-gazillion bloggers using it. I'm not sure I'd even recommend the average blogger think twice about formats. Just use whatever format your blogging software of choice gives to you. It works, be happy, rejoice.
But if you're a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, etc., then you are probably thinking hard about how to incorporate content syndication into your applications. And your "content" is quite possibly more than just words on a page. Your content might include images, sound, movies. It might include rich metadata like geo tags, event and calendar information, address data, product details, or recipient lists.
It is in those rich data scenarios -- i.e., in the stage beyond simple text blogging -- that Atom will be most useful. In fact, I'm tempted to make the argument that the reason we haven't gone there already is simply because the popular syndication formats weren't anticipating how to deal with it.
Sure, we've squeezed some rich media into RSS. And we can probably squeeze a whole lot more. I'm not even a zealot against using RSS in sophisticated applications -- the first version of OpenSearch was built on RSS after all, and it still works great for syndicating simple search results.
My point was more for the application developers, more for the people that work behind the scenes. Your users won't care whether you pick RSS vs Atom. Not yet, anyway. But I'm pretty sure that you, the application developer, will care. And that ultimately will impact your users.
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So with that aside, why don't we take Scoble up on his challenge? Why don't we go ahead and build the next generation of applications that do impact real users and do take advantage of the full richness that syndication can offer?
We should start embedding addresses, calendars, products, and contact information in our syndicated feeds. And we should start expecting our feed reader applications to notice this rich data and automatically open address books and maps and shopping carts whenever they can.
We should start syndicating our search engines. And if those search engines have access to rich data, then they should include that rich data in their syndicated search.
This will open up entirely new opportunities for the application developer. And more importantly, new opportunities for the users. Who, as Scoble rightly points out, are the only ones that really matter.
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RSS helped get the idea out to the public that content can be freed.
Now, let's go give them some more content.