Syndication Myths, Part I

We at FeedBurner (or is that "We of FeedBurner" or "We, the people of FeedBurner," or maybe just "We"?) read a lot about syndication. This usually involves keeping up with all the folks in the blogosphere that discuss syndication and its future on a regular basis. One of the things we've noticed recently is a preponderance of commentary along the lines of: "It doesn't matter which syndication format you use, because all of the readers and aggregators except X support all the formats now anyhow". As a company that provides services to thousands of publishers, we get a pretty good look at the variety of clients/aggregators and their level of popularity across a broad spectrum of feeds. As such, we (at FeedBurner etc.) can say with conviction that there are still a large number of very popular clients and aggregators that don't support one or more syndication formats (and it is not just legacy versions of a few clients/aggregators).

One of the reasons we launched SmartFeed was because we were consistently seeing such a large number of clients/aggregators that didn't support the latest syndcation formats.

Now, it's quite likely we are just witnessing the effects of an industry in its infancy, and that this issue will go away in the very near term, as either everybody standardizes to one format or the number of clients/aggregators quickly shakes down to just a couple industry leaders that support all the protocols and account for the vast majority of the market. We are certainly working under the assumption that something like this will happen in the fairly near term, and hey, the sooner we have to stop tracking over 300 different user-agents that behave in different ways, the happier we'll be.

There a host of other interesting things happening at the fringes of the syndication space that we believe will make SmartFeeds even more exciting and interesting, and as we've mentioned before, we are working to innovate on this notion of "subscriber-aware" feeds for a number of different reasons. We'll post more of our thoughts on this subject in Part 2 of Syndication Myths, coming either tomorrow or Monday, depending on how nice it is outside the rest of the weekend in Chicago.