Google released a news reader that supports both RSS and Atom. Reaction is biased in some quarters:
[Scripting News] Google’s news reader is an awkward slow, hard to use piece of software, like all news readers. Nicely done though, as if that matters. I’m afraid most people will think This is RSS? and give up on it. They really need to check out River of News. Download a copy of Radio, the 30-day trial is free (as if Google couldn’t afford the $39) and just try it out already. No patents. Steal from the best, it’s respectful.Dave Winer
I agree with Dave that a long stream of articles, either in full form or snippets, is a very efficient way of keeping up with news. There are plenty of examples out there of this, not just Radio though… Rawdog is what I use; the various ‘planet’ feeds (planet python) follow this style as well.
Its likely Google knows how to add this functionality… after all, just spitting out everything is the simplest functionality to deliver:
[for newsitem in newsitems output_html(newsitem)]
…so one can only assume they either a) don’t use it themselves and thus aren’t clued in (unlikely), or b) have business reasons for not spitting out everything in a users feed stream (more likely).
The simplest reason I can think of is that an unpaged, full feed, stream of RSS-aggregator-driven HTML will be… big! Mine is 287k at present, varies up and down from there.
Contrast that to what Google serves up as their core business offering, a search result page—these tend to run around 4 – 6K per page.
Did Google pass on the River of News functionality because they are inept programmers? Clearly not. Bad designers? Possible, but not likely.
To get to the answer, we have to first look at what motivates them to offer the functionality, for free, in the first place. Clearly its the value of the data lying within user subscriptions to RSS; this rich web gives them more insight as to the interconnectedness of the web – what and who is hot and where – and thus can allow them to refine their core product, the index, further. That’s the prime mission—delivering the best index in the world.
They don’t need to offer the worlds best feed aggregator to gain that benefit from their users, just a useful one, and one that doesn’t break the bank in the process.
Could there be a valid business reason for not dishing out 200 – 500K per page refresh, to millions if not hundreds of millions of potential users, for free?
I think so.