At Dave Winer's Berkman Thursday meeting last week, we got into an interesting conversation. Discussing RSS and the future, he riffed off my desire for immediate widespread adoption of RSS advocating that slow and steady wins the race. He had some good points -- it gives time to learn and improve without a huge userbase (which quickly eliminates progress -- see web browsers). It gives time to appreciate and resolve other limitations such as bandwidth. But from my point of view, fast is good. I want others to recognize the same productivity gains I have. The true VAR and non-technical user applications will be more quickly recognized and adopted. Money will flow in to fund improvements and development.
In many ways, Linux is a good example. Slow and steady is the NetBSD approach. Fast is good was the Linux approach. Without momentum, they would have never gotten to the point where there are consumer applications and games.
Neither approach is wrong. And some projects should use both at various times in the lifecycle. At this point I think RSS should be fast, Atom should be slow until the standard is proven in real applications. Thus, some vendors trying to be helpful may actually hurt the future of Atom by pushing it too far, too fast. The very word "Draft" or "Interim" in a standard document may play a key role in signalling the appropriate track.
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