Why Scoble's Life Will Be Better
When I posted the prior post about why I think
Echo matters, it was mainly a few remaining contrails from an email I sent to Robert Scoble. Scoble had a quick post about Echo yesterday, and I was geniunely surprised he didn't instantly see why Echo was relevant to users--he's a guy who I think gets the difference between technically cool and technically useful and he's an evangelist. He asked that I post it somewhere public so he could reply. What I said to Scoble was as follows, it's basically the same gist as my prior post:
Dare synthesizes the technical parts of why Echo is relevant and important pretty well. So it's pretty obvious why it matters for developers building the web blog infrastructure (which, I'm sure we both can agree, is really an outdated name for what's becoming a promising frontier of peer-to-peer publishing--sorry, it's late on the East Coast and I can't come up with a better catchall). I'm sure you see the upside of the project's potential standards for people building the infrastructure tools, one well-defined standard, a single unified and extensible API, less catfights taking away from actual forward progress, etc.What surprises me, is you, Mr. Longhorn Evangelist, didn't immediately find a parallel with how users' lives are improved, even if they might not directly know why. Better and deeper tools will be the direct result of better standards. More functionality at a baseline and an expanded notion of what blog focused interaction can be.I forget which aggregator you use, I use NewsGator. It took Greg a few months to get his posting infrastructure in place so I can readily post from a feed item to my blog. I still can't post comments from a feed item. I can't manage my blog from within NewsGator, I have to bang over to w.bloggar or my web back-end for either of those. (Don't get me wrong, I positively love NewsGator running in Outlook 2K3.)Now how much time does writing to multiple APIs, supporting 3 to 4 major flavors of RSS, not having a widespread comments api in place (Joe Gregario's is out there but really in its adoption infancy), how much extra time does Greg spend on these things instead of adding new features that users would benefit from? I bet Greg spends the majority of his development cycles on figuring out why this blog or that one generates a feed that's an edge case (and out of spec or in one of their grayer areas) and is mucking up NewGator bliss.So I think the benefit to users is pretty simple. How much did users benefit from the Windows API replacing DOS lack of a common application infrastructure? I'd say a lot. Developers went from writing their own print drivers (of widely varying quality and capability) to being able to focus on writing more capable and usable applications--don't call me out and remind me that 90% of this advanced functionality never gets used anyway. :)How was SGML's adoption vs. XML? There are some strong parallels between the SGML and XML standards in all of the RSS drama.Moreover, what are managed APIs in Longhorn going to do to benefit users? Why should users care about that aspect of Longhorn--sure they won't and it probably isn't part of the marketing plans, but you can see how they'll unknowingly benefit.You get it, I know you do. Now can Echo ever get off the ground and live up to its objectives? Who knows, but RSS is locked and dead and encumbered with Mr. Winer and his poor recess skills[1]... any alternative would be better and I think that's why you see people leaping at a chance for a better/different future.
[1] When I wrote this it was a condensed way of saying RSS as a standard has a lot a b.s. politics and infighting in its veins, I don't mean it as Dave being the sole cause of all the problems--it reads that way, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Dave fights with folks and folks fight with Dave. Right, wrong or otherwise it impedes progress.