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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

RSS-lovers shoot new supporter?

Personally I was really pleased to see an interview with my boss talking about RSS and how Sun intends to implement it in future offerings. So I was kinda surprised to see some of the boosters of RSS taking pot-shots. Dave Winer, for example, could have been a little more positive (and, all credit to him, says so in Scoble's comments), and Robert Scoble admits to being 'snarky' (because of the weather).

So some comments:

those Microsoft bloggers are killing us and we need some of our own!

We're already here. Not in the legions Microsoft has, admittedly, but it's the quality that matters not the quantity (or, indeed the volume of postings!)

Also, MSDN had RSS Feeds almost a year ago. Welcome to the RSS party. I agree, it is a fun one!

Actually, most Sun web properties (including java.sun.com) have had RSS for quite some time, as has the Java community site. And the Java community itself has been up there for ages with RSS support - just look at Java.Blogs for example, maybe that was actually inspiration for the PDC blogs?

Schwartz: "Those communities early on in the company's existence were probably nowhere near as well connected as they are today, certainly in nowhere near the same real-time mechanism as they are today. And RSS is increasingly becoming the principal means of real-time communication."
Translation: "Will someone please offer Scobleizer a ton of money to leave Microsoft? He's killing us." ;-)

Wrong! Schwartz was thinking of something else! But I can't tell you what just yet. Watch this space :-)

RSS wasn't done in the "open source community." It was done by Dave Winer. At least the RSS I use and like best (RSS 2.0).

Maybe he was thinking of Atom? And there is a ton of RSS implementation being done in open source.

By the way, is there a client-side RSS News Aggregator that was built in Java?

Interesting question. There's Friday and JPluck for mobile users, HotSheet (which installs using WebStart so you can just give it a try from here even on Windows, Newscrollet, NewsMonster of course (hybrid, I agree), nntprss which lets you use your newsreader to read RSS too, RSSView, RSSOwl, and doubtless others (credit to the Weblogs Compendium for helping with that list). In fact, I am struck by the diversity that Java has encouraged, even on mobile devices. Has life at Microsoft stopped you seeing the rest of the world, Robert?

Personally I am very excited by the fact that Jonathan Schwartz feels the need to promote Sun's use of RSS and I'm looking forward to ways we can apply the old mantra here, "co-operate on standards, compete on implementation".

posted at 2:56 AM (UK) | |