More Fun in Syndicationland
The past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful in the world of content syndication. We've seen a new feed format proposal from a group of frustrated users called RSS 1.1, and we have a new round of edits on the latest Atom format proposal. All of these efforts are well-intentioned, and even attractive from an engineering perspective, but it goes to show you that this space just isn't getting any simpler.
And that's just the feed formats. What's really going to be interesting are the namespace extensions. You think Microsoft will adopt the Apple ITMS namespace (hmmm ... can't get to this right now -- did Apple take this down?) in its feeds? Or Amazon.com will start using Six Apart's book namespace? Of course, a major part of FeedBurner's mandate is to sit in the middle and help negotiate these formats and namespaces between the publishers and clients, but it's going to be fascinating to see how clients will grow and adapt to take advantage of the additional metadata that will start flowing through these feeds.
The other interesting "debate" that has flared up again recently is the "auto-subscription" issue: if you click on a little XML chicklet, what should happen? How does that end up communicating to your aggregator-of-choice that you'd like to subscribe to that feed? People have generally fallen into two camps: the "feed:" group ("Register a protocol handler on your machine!") and the MIME-type group ("Just send down the right MIME type and configure your browser to use the right application!"). The MIME-type approach has found a recent champion in Randy Charles Morin, with his Universal Subscription Mechanism proposal. Both solutions have interesting technical challenges, yet neither approach helps a brand new user that doesn't yet have a client ... nor is it possible to really handle multiple clients ("I want most feeds to go to NewsGator, but my podcasts I want to go to iPodder ... oh, and Azureus should handle my television feeds"). That's fine: we have to start somewhere. I like our Browser-Friendly approach (look at my feed in a browser, for example), but I think we could do a better job helping people to subscribe to the feed by offering both feed:// and a USM approaches, as well as a wider varienty of online aggregators, so we can leverage the work that's going on to solve this problem. I think we'll work on that as soon as we get the time.
All of this is to say that the world of syndication is very active and exciting right now. Another indicator of the activity is the number of clients out there. As Dick mentioned in the recent Burning Questions posting entitled "RSS Market Share":
RSS Client market is not yet consolidating, it's expanding. There were 409 different clients polling the top 800 FeedBurner feeds in September and now there are 719 different clients. FeedBurner actively catalogs the behavior and specifications for hundreds of these user-agents.That's awesome. I just hope that the confusion surrounding the different formats doesn't deter the after-hours hacker from creating the next great syndication client.