Dan Gillmor’s eJournal logs: Google’s Syndication Changes: Atom, not RSS. “Google’s Jason Shellen confirms that the company is dropping RSS support in favor of Atom. Blogger-created blogs that were using RSS 1.0 before had the chance to keep it going, he says.” If you’re interested in lots of details, follow the links to Dave’s post to Roger’s posts.
If you’re not, here’s the scoop from my standpoint: blogs I was reading in Blogger have disappeared from my news aggregator with no notice or clue. Google, owner of the Blogger software, changed their feed formats from RSS 1.0 to Atom 0.3. Why? I can’t understand why they were just cut off. The feeds could have been paralleled, feeding both, perhaps with a nagging note to change to the new format.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I thought there was any substantial technical advances being made. It’s pretty obvious there are some nasty folks on every side of this debate, and I’m not particularly enamored of any of them. As a consumer, I’m annoyed. As a developer, I feel that more work has been made for me without any notice. A lot of news aggregator developers are staying up late tonight trying to extend their compatibility.
Google, with a mission statement of “Don’t be evil,’ could have handled this much better.