atom support

I know we're only at 0.3, but is someone mapping adoption of Atom, so that we can look back and determine just where the tipping point was, and what helped push the format to critical mass? In this classic chicken & egg, feed producers are obviously taking the lead -- in addition to the 0.3 spec, Mark Pilgrim's published a Movable Type template, there's Blosxom support from Rael Dornfest, and Jason Shellen announced on the blogger-dev list that support for the AtomAPI is coming soon. Things are also heating up on the feed consuming side: Newsgator supported the 0.2 version of the spec with their 1.3 release, and Bloglines just added support for Atom. I'm unclear on FeedDemon, since it supposedly went "gold" on Friday at midnight, while the Atom 0.3 spec was released on Saturday.

Way back in July I posted a bit at the old place titled "why who needs echo?" where I wondered aloud just how the benefits of this new syndication format are going to be explained in terms that make it worthwhile for end users -- either as publishers or consumers -- to adopt, either through an informed, transparent choice ("I'm switching to a new syndication format because..."), or through a more opaque, reasonably uninformed choice ("I'm switching to this new aggregator because look at all this whiz bang stuff it supports."). I still don't really understand the answer to that question...

In other words, will Atom cross the chasm? If so, why? And when?

Comments

[Matt Haughey]

I think it will cross the chasm (at least as much as RSS has, which isn't much to be honest) but it will take a while to get there. From everything I've read, it's looking like the real benefits aren't going to come out until there are lots of feeds and lots of readers and the api is baked into all the tools. Once all the pieces are complete, people can really start innovating.

In the meantime I think the general nature of the spec being more programmer friendly and complete than RSS, while at the same time usability improvements made in the feeds by designers will make atom feeds just slightly beneficial.

I say revisit this in six months and we'll see some whiz bang cool atom-using apps that couldn't be built today.