Steve Gillmor is Unintelligible
Update: Steve Gillmor cracks me up.
God, I love Steve Gillmor. Steve just wrote an article about how much Feedburner sucks now that Google bought them, and how FriendFeed might end up eating Google’s lunch in this area. Unfortunately, Steve writes these insanely long, nonsensical articles with one good idea thrown in randomly somewhere in the mix, while puffing the whole thing up with with pseudo-technical gobbledegook.
There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.
Wow! Let’s deconstruct this Steve Gillmor article in a little more detail.
The Resplendent Lede - Steve starts off with a grandiose, meaningless prognostication.
There’s going to be a moment in the near future where FriendFeed needs to deliver realtime search over IM.
This makes me feel like I’m in an episode of 24, and Jack Bauer just barked at me to send the nuclear detonation codes to his Palm III, or something.
The Creamy, Meaningless Center - Steve takes a sharp detour somewhere off into the weeds, producing run-on sentences that seem sagely at first, but leave you fundamentally unsatisfied. Soon, you realize that you were just exposed to the equivalent of 45 seconds of textual Olestra.
The ROI on managing a Twitter Follow community produces reasonable economies of scale for only a very few. The Scobles must maintain their clouds regardless of the effort expended, while the up and comers are getting squeezed on FriendFeed by noisier folks willing to marginalize the threads with noise. People like Tim O’Reilly apparently avoid the comments and likes, and as a result the domain itself.
The Unexpected Detour - You’ve just zigged in order to catch up with Steve, but wait, he just zagged! Wow!
With its purchase of FeedBurner and recent rolloever (sic.) of FeedBurner URLs to its own domain, Google has experienced some significant latency in syncing new posts to its dominant RSS feeds...[Most] posts I’ve published in the last several weeks have averaged over two hours before they propagate to the RSS audience of Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter, and beyond.
The Buzzword-Packed Conclusion - Steve needs to bring this nightmarish beast in for a landing, regardless of whether its wheels are up or down.
[We] will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.
via The Realtime Ping Server by Steve Gillmor.