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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Speaking of dumb ideas
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Dave Winer and John Robb are flogging a truly stupid idea - a central repository for RSS subscriptions that would serve as a "solution" to the one click "problem". Go read what Dare Obasanjo has to say about this; he covers the bases pretty well. There are a couple of immediate problems that come to mind:
privacy concerns - how well protected will these subscriptions be? Are we all willing to show the world everything that we read?
single point of failure - enough said
The amazing thing is how much traction this dumb idea seems to be getting - witness Tim Bray's non-dismissal of the idea. You know, this isn't hard to solve on the client end - there's the feed:url solution - which many aggregators, including BottomFeeder already support. There's also mime level handling, as per the USM - I will be porting the code for that into BottomFeeder soon, just as soon as I acquire the energy the go back to registry hacking :)
The point is, this is a fairly easy to solve problem at the client side, where the two big problems - privacy and single point problems - disappear, or at least go under the management of the user himself.
Briefly alluded to in Tim's post is another problem, which I think is the ultimate reason that this won't get a lot of traction - where's the business model? What's the motivation for anyone to set up a huge server farm to service all of this?
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