Since everyone's jumping up and down about the Atom vs. RSS (or "Google vs. RSS" if that's your paranoia) debate, it's probably worth pointing out that My Yahoo's RSS module also groks Atom. It was added last night. It took about a half hour.

Yahoo's ability to add Atom support that quickly demonstrates why Google is wrong to mothball RSS. As the 600-pound gorilla in weblogging, the company ought to support an established (and open) syndication format used by thousands of people, even as it adopts and encourages a promising new format.

Alwin Hawkins asked whether non-programmers should care about any of this.

As I told him, it probably will be a plumbing issue that doesn't affect RSS or Atom users much, because Google is the only software developer in the weblogging world that's taking sides and forcing users to pick one format. I'm surprised that Google would want that distinction for itself, considering its celebrated "don't be evil" policy, but we'll see how the company reacts as the issue gets more traction in the media. [Workbench]

4:40:34 PM    

I just heard from Paul Martino, the CTO and Founder of Tribe.net, that they were working on FOAF and RSS support for Tribe. Cool. There are going to be a lot of issues such as privacy, but I think that having companies like Tribe seriously working on FOAF will bring these issues front and center and make some of these theoretical discussions very concrete and productive.

[Joi Ito's Web]

Congrats to Mark Pincus, Paul Martino and all the folks at Tribe.net for this apparent stroke of genius!

3:26:02 PM