This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Depends on the user Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Greg Reinacker says his aggregator will continue to accept bad feeds. This may make his competitors look like idealistic dreamers for thinking it would serve users' interests if they spend more time designing and coding new features and less time working around bugs in content. With all due respect, I think Greg is wrong about users. They do care about quality.

That all depends on the user in question. Technical users - like, say, the ones involved in this discussion - care. Non-technical users might well care, but not in the way you might think. I think of my neighbors, in sales and teaching. They use computers, but are not the least bit technical. Last year, after they got a PC back from their vendor support, it couldn't print. They had no idea how to fix the problem. Likewise, if they start using an aggregator, and it throws some error message at them for a feed, they won't have any idea what it means, nor will they care. They may stop using the feed; the may try another aggregator; they may get turned off on the whole notion of news aggregators. Rest assured, notifying the producer of the bad content will not be something they would do.

Now, consider - are most software users like us, or like my neighbors? I think the answer is clear, unless you aren't thinking very hard. This explains why non-technical users like Windows and Mac, and don't really like Linux - because it's too hard. End users want software that works like their TiVo or their ReplayTV. Minimal setup, easy to interact with, and - outside of absolutely critical errors - doesn't bother them with trivia. To an end user, having a non-compliant character in a feed item is trivia. Ask yourself this - would you want your stereo to inform you explicitly everytime it comes across a flaw on the CD you are trying to play? or do you want it to compensate and move on?