Monday, March 18, 2013

Another Case Of RSS Love

I was poking around the support site for my new laptop when I noticed a link to subscribe to driver updates:

I figured this would be handled over e-mail. I was wrong. Here's what I saw when I clicked the subscribe link:

That's right, an RSS feed. And that was one of my main points: RSS is a simple and powerful way to deliver a stream of information. By adding this feed to Reader, I have yet another bit of "news" in front of me that's just as relevant as political updates and local driving conditions. RSS lets me consume all this information in one consistent place.

Which leads me to wonder aloud: information is Google's business, but they want to reduce costs; why not phase out the UI of Google Reader but leave the underlying API for developers to tap into? That means fewer developers dedicated to a project they aren't excited about, but continued involvement in a massively powerful framework that drives all sorts of novel applications of the web.
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