Bye, Bye RSS. A format controlled by no one. Now Google is going to force us to change to a more Google compatible format, which means Atom. At least Dave Winer thinks so.

Dave has gotten a bad reputation lately by the pundit, but he has a point this time. When Microsoft was able to control the file format everyone used, guess what, Wordperfect and Lotus Smart Suite are used only by the lonely few. Well it might happen that way again with RSS.

With the purchase of Feedburner by Google and Google Reader becoming the most prevalent feed reader, Google has become the largest feed consumer. With that much power it would be easy for them to make incompatible changes to the current feed formats to improve their products at the expense of everyone else’s. Despite how much all the other feed users complain, the fact is they will have to re-code their applications or risk losing access to a large market segment.

Gives us something to think about.

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