A message of hope
RSS is one of the last holdouts of a more open web and it’s been gratifying to see that there’s enough interest in it to sustain some great independent services that care more about the product than eyeballs.
It used to be that the web was a platform – not just its technical underpinnings, but the content itself that was on the web. Then it was gradually reduced to a substrate for supporting a bunch of oil rigs, each isolated. Or so it seems; it is easy to forget that the web still has the platform nature. The magic of the hyperlink has survived, in fact has even been preserved with some care by the new barons. Even Facebook or Google+ ain’t AOL. But how much promise has been lost (cf.). Yet with the nature of the web never having gone anywhere, maybe what was can be again.