Closed Products and Open Platforms
At a fundamental core, Google News and RSS tried to answer the same problem, how to aggregate the most current articles from your favorite news sites and blogs? Having a ton of raw brainiacs with twenty percent time Google over engineered their solution with more artificial intelligence than common sense. Google News came out of an engineer’s 20 percent time and allowed him to simultaneously read top head headlines from thousands of newspapers.
Another approach to this problem, having to visit multiple sites to catch up with the news, was Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS has grown to be used in news aggregators not too unfamiliar to Google News, podcasts, and many other websites and programs. One example of a online RSS aggrigator is Happy Coder’s Daily Digest. Happy Coder’s Daily Digest aggregates the latest headlines from nearly 100 of my favorite technology bloggers.
In my mind, RSS provides a lot more value, even though it’s history is marred with constant battles over standardization. Those battles are what forged RSS to a de facto technology and it allowed for uses not envisioned by its original creators.