Here's an interesting twist.
The main feed for Scripting News is now also an Instant Articles-compatible feed.
Just like the one I did specially for Facebook.
The difference is that thousands of people already subscribe to this feed. So the installed base of people who could benefit from the mobile-faster IA content just grew by a fairly huge amount.
I know this is a new idea -- IA feeds as a basis for interop outside of Facebook, but it is that. And because all CMSes are being updated to support the format, it's a relatively simple matter to add the feature to already-existing feeds.
WordPress, for example could do this, as could Tumblr or Blogger. Of course any of them would increase the size of IA-compatible content by a much larger factor than my own humble feed.
Think about it.
Still diggin! :-)
Doug Purdy on the philosophy at Facebook that led them to use RSS instead of inventing something new:
We need to stop reinventing everything again and again. While I realize that most engineers don't like existing art for anything more than making fun or leveraging conceptually, we should be taking a far more pragmatic evolutionary engineering approach with most of the core communication infra and compete on product features/content.
And my response:
Very well put Doug. I always try to re-use whenever possible. That's in fact how I came to support RSS in the first place. I had a syndication format called scriptingNews format, because that's what it syndicated. Netscape made their service read my format, and of course they did what you describe here, invented their own format. So I played a sneaky trick on them, I just adopted their format. Instant standard.