torsten's .NET blog - Re: Funky Defined

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Re: Funky Defined

Found on Don Park's: Funky Defined. The first time Don Box post valid and funky is good, I feel bad about my feed wasn't funky. But now I'm happy to be not funky according to Dave. Good RSS, easy to aggregate. Currently no reason to replace it. But following the discussions about Echo, e.g. here, most of the people think of Echo as an RSS (2.0) replacement, that's still the wrong point of view. The idea behind it was to propose a standard to post items and comments to blogs. If you are a w.bloggar user (like me) you may have seen the setup screen with a huge list of different blogger backend API's. That's the point: the whole list should be replaced by one item: Echo. All the things like BlogThis, IBlogExtension, CommentAPI etc. including RSS itself, but not only can be expressed by Echo. Isn't that nice? That is the point, point.

Technorati tags: Ramblings | RSS

Tuesday, July 01, 2003 1:22:09 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Comments [3] |

Tuesday, July 01, 2003 4:22:15 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

The kicking off point for Echo was, as far as I can see, disatisfaction with the state of the RSS spec - i.e. you had to do a lot of guessing and poking around different feeds to see how most people were doing it.
Echo above all is going to be a syndication format, the API will provide backup to that by using the same structures to pass info around. So, to me it does still seem to be trying to knock RSS 2.0 off its perch. That isn't necessarily a bad thing RSS is weak at points but the annoyance comes at having to support to competing formats when previously RSS was doing quite nicely.
Admittedly the 'funky' stuff didn't help a great deal as it made Dave Winer look a bit like a petulant kid, even if he was right - which I think he is.
On the API front there are currently only two viable API - Blogger and MetaWeblog. EchoAPI won't be able to oust these as even Ben Trott of Movable Type has said they'll continue to support those APIs for the foreseeable future - so we'll simply end up with another API to implement and support - there are too many API clients available for the switch and the shift down to happen over night.
Both of the current API and RSS 2.0 are picking up momentum whilst Echo is still being debated over. It will only ever be complimentary to, never (IMO) replace those existing technologies.
Hmm... this is almost a blog post in itself ;-)

Adrian

Wednesday, July 02, 2003 6:04:37 AM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

... so why you dont't use trackback to answer :)
Again: would love to have this feature as a w:bloggar/BlogWorks combination. Awaiting the more practical things out of the echo/necho/RSS profile discussion(s).

torstenR

Thursday, July 03, 2003 4:37:13 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Too old fashioned - I like coming to read your site here rather than through RSS, I haven't relaesed the CommentAPI enabled version of BW and TrackBack's a pain in the butt :-)
Echo could be good. I'm following the API stuff with interest as the CommentAPI stuff has given me the taste for the RESTian approach to APIs as against XML-RPC.

Adrian

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