Home > Archive >  2009 >  September >  15

Brad, let's get together

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Brad Fitzpatrick did what I used to do, say what he really thinks in a blog post about RSS stuff. It's fine, but it is just his point of view. There are other points of view that are valid, like mine. 

About "just happen to work at Google" -- come on, man -- how many people who don't happen to work at Google can add code to the following products: 1. Feedburner, 2. Google Reader, 3. Blogger.  

Further, prior art is really important, it's how you keep the breadth of the pile of tech we create as small as possible, allowing us to build higher with the finite brain capacity each of us has. The cloud element was right there in the spec. And when we talked, you knew about it. So to say you never heard of it, well -- I think you had.  

It's true -- I was pretty freaked when I saw the note at the top of your spec that RSS didn't matter. Sometimes I think Google really believes that. Now I'm here to say RSS does matter. You can't pretend it doesn't because it does. You blew every kind of smoke at it when we talked. That's really good motivation for a guy like me who takes pride in his work. 

Now why did I get busy with rssCloud? Primarily because I wanted to remember how it worked. Once I got started, I remembered why I liked it, so I kept going. That's all. 

Brad, we should get together and talk about bringing our projects together. This is what you were going to have to do whether I reactivated rssCloud or not, because RSS is there, and it's huge, and you were trying to ignore it.