Well it has been a few months since someone got started on this debate again. It seems some engineer over at Amazon is saying Atom over RSS and he goes into quite a lengthy informative post about it, that makes a good read. But I’ll be honest when was the last time you visited a website that only had a Atom feed on it versus a RSS?
I did get a e-mail from someone tonight that said, “I clicked on the RSS button, and your page come up in code I could not read” he proceeded to tell me I had to fix it to make it look like a regular web page.
I explained to him that RSS is not meant to be read, but some services have converted peoples RSS into a page that can be read. I am not gonna talk about diminishing your brand on those services tonight, but what I will say is that even with the massive domination of RSS, and near non adoption of Atom the Amazon engineer words are likely wasted as their are no software tools built today to exploit all this functionality that Atom purportedly has. Meanwhile we will have to continue to educate consumers on exactly the benefits of RSS [www.unto.net]