Re: Google are killing the future of RSS

I’ve been having a conversation with Andy Beard on a post of his entitled “Google are killing the future of RSS“. For some reason, my most recent comment has not appeared on the page. I can only assume that he did not appreciate its tone. So, I have decided to post the comment here:

The task list examples are bogus. It’s the user’s personal information, not the publisher’s. The user should be able to do what he wants with it, even accidentally share it with the world.

The financial information and marketing examples do have some merit. (Why someone would subscribe to a feed full of marketing speak is beyond me. But whatever.)

However, I don’t think any of these cases are strong enough to warrant adding a no-sharing restriction to feeds. (I’m taking back the “more power to you” statement in my last post. That was an incredibly stupid thing to say.) I’ve come to the realization that what we’re really talking about is a DRM scheme. We’ve already seen the kind of damage that can be done with DRM in the music, film, and ebook industries. Adding it to RSS for some short-term gain would be a disaster.

There’s another programmatic way you could solve this problem. Simply prevent applications that allow for sharing to access your feeds. Very easy to implement. It would also help you with your goal of having less readers.

11/6/2006 9:57 PM | Tags: DRM, Google, Marketing, RSS | Trackback

3 Comments feed

Hi Matt

I don’t censor negative comments. Everyone is entitled to differing opinions.
Unfortunately Spam Karma for some reason didn’t like you with the default configuration. It also blocked the pingback for some reason.

Spam Karma 2 Report:
+0.50 - Javascript Payload: Valid Javascript payload (can be fake).
+0.50 - Link Counter: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL)
-2.50 - Encrypted Payload: Encrypted payload valid: IP not matching.
-8.00 - Snowball Effect: Commenter granularity (based on URL): 0 old comment(s) (karma avg: 0.000000), 4 recent comment(s) (karma avg: 5.400000).

-4.00 - Snowball Effect: Commenter granularity (based on email): 0 old comment(s) (karma avg: 0.000000), 4 recent comment(s) (karma avg: 5.400000).

-13.50 - Overall Karma

As to your examples, I think they are a bit extreme

Having a requester popup saying

“Do you really want to share XYZ because:-”

When you are browsing down your “River of News” and hitting shift S to share stuff, it is very easy to make a mistake.

In some ways Google is already treating RSS like email, that is probably the reason they don’t provide any subscriber information, in the same way by defauly pictures (used for tracking) are not shown in Gmail.
Google are making RSS more private which many might look on as a good thing.

Unfortunately advertising and some level of tracking go hand in hand, otherwise you can’t evaluate the effectiveness of the advertising.

But you are right in one way. If RSS doesn’t have a way of preventing sharing, eventually content publishers will come up with an alternative replacement for RSS which they can control, and that is the distribution method that will become mass market.

Andy Beard | 11/7/2006 10:38 AM

The conversation continues back on Andy’s site.

Matt | 11/8/2006 8:18 PM

[...] I’d really like to know what they say about it. 11/12/2006 10:50 AM | Tags: Podcasting | Trackback OneComment [...]

11/12/2006 10:50 AM - Matthew Gifford | 11/13/2006 9:16 AM

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