Scoble says "RSS 3.0 should be positioned as "the best way to do syndication on Microsoft's Longhorn."
IMHO Scoble's offer/spin to Harvard would clearly be the straw that kills RSS forward motion and future as a messaging spec leader. I also think it is to early for Harvard to make such an emotional market move. Why would they do that? What would be in it for them in the long term? IMHO, it's to much of a short term gain. It would be over before they got started.
We all know Microsoft would love to have a popular syndication spec positioned on it's new Microsoft Longhorn. Nothing like spreading some FUD to try to get one. I think Harvard is smarter then this. They also know the market is smarter then this. What ever happened to the idea of working to keep open standards open for all/ever?
IMHO finding a solution to keep the RSS spec open, moving it forward as a community without big company control and major input is the only way to go.
I believe we will see Harvard respond in some way to ATOM's latest forward movement. They can't afford to do nothing or be seen as partipating in the old emotional polarizing wars (that they were not part of) that were just bad for the whole field.
It'll be interesting to see how Harvard positions RSS in the short term.
Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog: A letter to Harvard about Syndication.
A Note to Harvard University:
Dave Winer handed you a major gift when he turned RSS 2.0 over to Harvard. One that, I'm sure, you might not yet fully appreciate.
I've seen the light. Syndication will clearly be a major part of what happens next in the computer world. Already my ability to read Web sites has increased ten fold (I now read about 640 RSS feeds in the time it used to take me to read less than 60 HTML-based Web sites).
You think RSS isn't changing things? Heck, just look at politics. Here's a new RSS news aggregator that one of the top presidential candidates, Howard Dean, is using to push news out to his followers.
The fact that Harvard now owns the RSS specification will let Harvard play in a whole new realm of technology that our society will use. That is if Harvard doesn't blow it between now and 2005.
That's what this letter is all about.
Today Harvard's spec, RSS 2.0, is the leader in the syndication race. But, if everything remains the way it is today, RSS won't be on top for long.
Why not?
Because the market is changing. Just over the weekend there was a corner turn in the Atom camp. Atom is a format (and an API) that competes with RSS. Why is that? Because Atom started with the RSS spec and improved on it. What was the corner turn? Over the weekend Sam Ruby shipped a set of slides that spelled out quite clearly just how it is better.
That alone didn't mean much. But, today, my favorite news aggregator (NewsGator) supports both Atom and RSS. NewsGator is built on Microsoft's .NET platform. Why is that important? Well, today it might not seem to be. But, we're building our next version of Windows (code-named Longhorn) and Longhorn gives tons of new capabilities to .NET developers that haven't existed before.
Why is that a problem? Because Microsoft's developers are starting to compare RSS 2.0 and Atom and I'm seeing more and more of them switch to Atom because of the advantages laid out in Sam Ruby's slides.
What does that trend mean? Well, the value of the gift that Dave Winer gave you is going down every day. It might not look important today. Very few people are supporting Atom today. Well, except for Google, Six Apart, and IBM. Do they matter to this industry? Will the products they ship have an impact on the weblogging and syndication markets? To the Internet itself? You betcha!
Which is why I'm writing this letter. It's a roadmap of how Harvard will end up being the syndication leader in 2006, instead of Atom, er Google and IBM.
Here's what I'd do if I were at Harvard and in charge of the RSS spec:
1) Announce there will be an RSS 3.0 and that it will be the most thought-out syndication specification ever.
2) Announce that RSS 3.0 will ship on July 1, 2005. That date is important. For one, 18 months is long enough to really do some serious work. For two, RSS 3.0 should be positioned as "the best way to do syndication on Microsoft's Longhorn." The betas for Longhorn should really be rocking by that date, so you'll have tons of new developers trying to build innovative things for Longhorn. More on that later. For three, it would freeze the market for 18 months because "Mr. Safe" will not want to move away from RSS before he sees what the future of RSS will be. Also, "Mr. Safe" will want to stick on a platform that will be compatible with RSS 3.0. Today that platform is RSS 2.0.
3) Open up a mailing list, a wiki, and a weblog to track progress on RSS 3.0 and encourage community inclusion.
4) Work with Microsoft to ensure that RSS 3.0 will be able to take advantage of Longhorn's new capabilities (in specific, focus on learning Indigo and WinFS). Build a prototype (er, have MSN build one) that would demonstrate some of the features of RSS 3.0 -- make this prototype so killer that it gets used on stage at the Longhorn launch (in fact, make it even better than that, so it gets included with every copy of Longhorn that's shipped).
5) Make sure RSS 3.0 is simply the best-of-breed syndication protocol. Translation: don't let Microsoft or Google come up with a better spec that has more features.
Why would you do all of this?
Well, imagine what'll happen to Harvard's name recognition if your syndication format gets demonstrated on stage by Bill Gates? Imagine where future software engineering students will want to attend. Harvard or Stanford? Hmmm. Stanford generated Google. You do the math. How much does a single student pay nowadays? $150,000+ to attend Harvard for four years? How many students decide to attend Stanford because that's where Google and Yahoo were started?
But, it'd take some vision. It'd take some chutzpah.
Of course, if you don't have the vision, that's OK. Atom is there to take over if you fumble the football.
