Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Betsy Devine playing the guitar in her early 20s. Babe! 

Jackson West: "San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your startup off the ground." 

Thanks to Eric Norlin for the kind words about the RSS 2.0 roadmap. 

Scoble is hanging out with Joe Trippi, formerly of Dean For America, in Seattle. He looks tan, fit and relaxed.  

Why formats like RSS 2.0 work 

The roadmap of the RSS 2.0 spec, a piece of text that I thought about for years, but actually wrote in just a few minutes, has been the key to keeping RSS a stable platform for people to build on.

There have always been people who feel that the roadmap should be broken, but it hasn't been broken, and it won't be, because now there's a huge community that has invested billions of dollars around its assumptions.

The roadmap actually encourages risk, but some people always seem to want to have their ideas accepted without taking the risk. They think they can make something better than RSS and shouldn't have to go through the same vetting process that RSS itself went through. Now, it may be possible that after three years in the market, that RSS 2.0 could be radically improved, but the roadmap says that no person or group of people has the exclusive right to improve it, and that no one can interfere with the stability of the platform. That's no different if you work for a small company or large, or don't work for a company at all.

Yet the roadmap provides two paths for people who wish to radically improve on RSS. You can extend it through namespaces, or you can take the format and make a new format as an evolution, but you must not call that RSS.

These constraints have served us well. They have kept the platform stable, so Microsoft could take two years to adopt it from top to bottom in their Windows operating system, and not have RSS change while they did their work. Small companies also need time to get their ideas, built on top of RSS, to market, to build their teams, and win customers, and compete with others, not on compatibility, but on value to customers: price, performance, service.

This is what we all have to live with, me, you, everyone involved in RSS. No one has the exclusive right to determine the path forward for RSS, you may influence but you may not decide. You have to sell your ideas, they are not mandates.