> Google has an interest in our depending on Google to find stuff, so of course they see RSS as a threat.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
You forgot Feedburner that Google used to monetized feeds. Almost all bloggers I followed in Google Reader used it to track and monetize. Google had a lot of control over RSS.
I don't know how it is know but when I was doing a lot of SEO publishing 10 years ago Feedburner was the best kept secret.
People would always be complaining that Google wouldn't index their pages for months but if you: (1) burn an RSS feed, (2) subscribe to the burned feed, and (3) add items to the feed, the items would be indexed almost immediately.
> But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
I don't think Google's fear is who's in control of any one particular RSS. I think Google's fear is what if people realize that, for the purposes of subscribing to updates from a source, RSS is objectively better than Google. They're afraid of losing the mindshare of being the unquestionably better option for everything.
Exactly, thank you my friend. I'm happy to see that such ideas are entering the mainstream.
(Ok, you and I are probably not the most "mainstream" people in the world, but what I mean is these ideas aren't understood exclusively by antitrust lawyers anymore)
Companies are catching up too though. Google coaches its employees on what language to use internally.
But they historically had several feed systems [1] [2] which were fully under their control.
> Cue some "googler" show up defending this move and how it makes the world better.
Of course. 'We have a better system that uses 2FA to securely text you every ten minutes to generate a code that, in combination with a 16 character unicode password, allows you to check whether Google approved content has been updated.'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader