And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.
Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now:
Ha, similar stories - I'm aware of Technorati, they really should have been the firehose of their day (I guess Wordpress.com is the closest thing now). I was building a feed reader that would cluster conversations around the blogosphere so you'd get a better sense of the daily zeitgeist than just following quotes or trackbacks. Which brings me to the more direct comparison - comments and trackbacks to replies and retweets. Finding new content branching from what you're already reading, and frankly the experience was just clunky and terrible compared to Twitter. And that's assuming you've even _found_ a feed reader and subscribed to some feeds. And even if _that_ was easy, where are you yourself publishing? Every task was harder, and only Tumblr has really come close to replicating Twitter's level of integration on a blog-like platform.
Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.
This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.