Trent W. Buck <twb@cyber.com.au> wrote:
While doubtless useless to you, I feel compelled to mention that gwene.org, which translates RSS/Atom's idiotic design into a newsgroup, so you can read it with a real newsreader (like gnus). gwene groups are also carried by gmane.org, which does the same thing for mailing lists, like this one.
That's a very good idea - let's just convert ATOM/RSS feeds to NNTP. There is a proliferation of protocols: SMTP, NNTP, RSS/ATOM, XMPP, IRC, etc., in addition to Web APIs for various services that all perform similar but slightly different functions. I sometimes wonder whether we'll see more consolidation of such protocols in the future. The Wave Federation Protocol was an innovative attempt which, though unsuccessful as a Google product, continues to be developed by Apache and others. Another interesting entrant in this space is pump.io, the API of which is to be based on activity streams (http://activitystrea.ms/). It encompasses short and long messages, links, videos etc., as well as the maintenance of a social graph and group formation, according to my cursory reading of the documentation.