It's been 17 months since I published my RSS manifesto, arguing strongly that everybody should serve up full RSS feeds, and nothing since then has changed my mind. But Seeking Alpha's David Jackson leaves me a comment today, as a follow-up to another comment he posted yesterday, saying that RSS has basically been a failure, and asking "what will make APIs different".
David has a peculiar criterion for success: he seems to think that RSS was meant to be something which lots of people would adopt, and which would generate just as much money, through ads in full RSS feeds, as traditional display ads generate on websites.
Clearly that hasn't happened. But I was certainly never someone who thought that would happen, and I don't know anybody else who thought along those lines either.
Here's David:
If judged by the degree of adoption outside the tech community, RSS has generally been a failure. Perhaps the reason is that readers wanted intelligent aggregation: they want to know which topics are important, and which articles to read on those topics. RSS couldn't do that, because most RSS readers force the user to browse all the subscribed-to RSS feeds and piece together any themes for themselves.
The winning model turned out to be Techmeme, which does exactly that: it tells me which topics are hot and which articles to read on them. Here at Seeking Alpha, we've followed a similar model with our home page: we've moved away from a "stream of content" to intelligent clustering of articles by "story".
And what happened to RSS monetization? Feedburner offered ads in RSS, but nobody reported that they made any real money from them.
So the question is: How are APIs different from RSS?
There's a lot to unpack here. Firstly, the criterion for success of
