Google Blogoscoped

Friday, April 15, 2005

Google and RSS

Dave Winer compares the “big three”, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, in their adoption of RSS technology. Of all three, Google is losing out. Dave says:

“To this day Google doesn’t do anything interesting with RSS feeds. It can’t even display feeds in an intelligent way. Perhaps it’s NIH [Not Invented Here] that’s keeping them from embracing RSS as their two main competitors have. Whatever it is, Yahoo is dashing in front, with Microsoft close behind.

Why isn’t Google in the race? To me it remains a mystery.”

Sort of agreed – especially, I feel Google would be able to build a killer blog search if only they wanted to. Even though Google is somewhat betting on Atom*, they don’t wholeheartedly embrace even that.

*Atom to some is just another flavor of RSS further subdividing and complicating the issue, and to others, it’s a more clean replacement to RSS (it would have failed at being that so far, since RSS hasn’t even remotely gone away).

But while Google is often late in the game, it equally often then releases something infinitely better than what competitors are doing at that time – just think of web mail, online maps, or even web search itself. Especially with email and web search people were thinking these were solved problems, and it took a much better product to remind them they weren’t.

Having said that I have some suspicion Google is a) already working on something – if only acquiring Technorati, or including more and more blogs into Google News – or b) lifting their normal web search to such immense indexing speed that they can treat blogs like any other web page and still keep up with the extra-fast pace of blogspace. And then there’s Dave Winer’s c)... they’re completely missing out on blogs.

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!