David Stone's Blog

Echo, PIE, and Atom are all the same thing. That group can't figure out a good name.

Ah, thank you Robert. It's making a little bit more sense now. :)

No... remember he has a bias toward Dave Winer. The full truth is Echo is already copyrighted and the group wiki pretty clearly calls it Atom. Certain misinformed parties may be slamming it by call ing it (n)Atom since for a few days until they renamed it they had to alter from the Echo tag. Pie was a suggestion at one point. Get it? :P

Seriously, there been some serious politics going on. Userland (who previous had Winer as their CEO) graciously (in their words) ceded all control to Berkman Center at Harvard (where Winer is now employed). So, while Userland no longer controls RSS, Dave WIner and a hand-selected group of techies who at one point or another associated closely with Winer now control it.

What followed was a high amount of FUD on both parts - particularly IMHO Winer and company. Again INHO this was an attempt to steal the momentum from Atom. Gracious? Possibly. Pre-emptive? Probably.

On the Atom end they have been working toward a finished standard. Like most any undertaking like this with numerous parties involved, they have so far had mixed results. I'm guessing they will come up with a finished standard, and while a competitor to RSS, it also will end up not being one. More like the competition between ESPN and NBC. Sure, they compete for the same viewer, but if you want to watch any college football except Notre Dame you watch ESPN, and if you want to watch a great show about the criminal justice system you watch Law and Order.

Strip away the personal friction and I think this is what you'll get. Funny, IMHO if you check out scripting.com over the last 4 weeks you'll find about 45% postings about RSS and it's benefits. And IMHO if you pay check out the Atom side of things it feels like they've backed off the Winer attacking since Userland dropped out of the picture.