BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
The RSS Fiasco
By Jon Udell
May 4, 2001
(The First Mass Web Extinction
: Page 3 of 4 )
The wave of extinction also affected those of us who use the Rich Site Summary (RSS) format to promote websites.
I first wrote about this in a June, 1999 column on Netscape and Microsoft channels. Ever since then, I've used RSS to promote my own website and others I manage, including Linux Magazine.
Dave Winer, at UserLand Software, has recounted the history of RSS. Briefly, it started as a way to syndicate headlines from Scripting News. Netscape later proposed the format that became RSS, and implemented an RSS aggregator and viewer at my.netscape.com. There have always been other aggregators and viewers, including My UserLand, Moreover, and more recently, Meerkat and News Is Free. And it's a lucky thing because last week, Netscape pulled the plug on My Netscape's RSS channels. Jake Ochs was the first newsgroup correspondent to be rudely surprised by this:
Jake Ochs:
It looks like Netscape killed the custom channels (RSS) feature.
Bummer. They really broke a golden rule on this one. No notification that the service would be terminated, no backward compatibility with the new My
Netscape. I am not pleased.
Shortly thereafter, Meerkat creator Rael Dornfest weighed in on the matter, noting that Netscape had sinned even more egregiously than was first apparent. It wasn't just that My Netscape users, like Jake, couldn't use their custom channels any more on the My Netscape page.
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2001 > May
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