RSS aggregator roundtable

DrunkenBlog posted an interview with developers of the leading feed aggregators for Mac Operating System (OS) X. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, David Watanabe of NewsFire, Rory Prior of NewsMac, Erik J. Barzeski of PulpFiction, and Graham Parks of Shrook answered questions about the basics of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the threat of Safari RSS, auto-discovery of feeds, competing feed formats, and the business model for producing RSS feeds. Graham Parks on feed formats:

Atom looks to be so much more reliable and usable than any version of RSS. Once v1.0 is published next year, I imagine there will be few new implementations of RSS.

Of course, it will still be around and readers will still have to understand it, but it won’t be able to compete with the IETF-backed Atom spec.

Brent mentioned Jabber/Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as a possible solution to the scaling issue, a solution I had not heard before.