It seems to have been a long time coming, but Atom has finally reached 1.0 status as an IETF standard. Lots of smart people seem to have worked hard to produce a high-quality result. Judging by this comparison of features, it certainly seems better than RSS 2.0.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it gaining much traction any time soon.
The problem is that Atom doesn’t really solve any problems for most people. As a syndication format, Atom solves some problems to do with the identity of posts and optional fields. This is definitely A Good Thing. As I said, Atom is better than RSS. The problem, though, is that RSS is good enough. There isn’t see much incentive for anyone to change. This is not because a lot of infrastructure needs to be ripped-out: on the contrary, aggregator vendors will, I’m sure, quickly add Atom 1.0 support to their products and many CMS vendors will provide Atom feed capabilities. Anyone who then wants Atom can use it. I don’t see that happening much because no-one (feed consumers or producers) really gain much Its like IMAP vs POP3. IMAP is widely supported, has some great features, and is certainly technically superior; but everyone gets by with POP3 because it is good enough.
As a publishing protocol, Atom is infinitely better than the alternative from the RSS world: the MetaWeblog API. Anyone who has ever had to write code to generate conformant MetaWeblog messages (and I have) knows that the spec is a joke: some things just plain can’t be done, and everything else can be done in multiple ways. But no-one except a small number of developers writing blogging clients really care. Again, MetaWeblog is good enough because its shortcomings are not a problem for most people.
Its a shame. As a techie I want the best solution to succeed. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that is going to happen in this case.
The lesson? Go read the cathedral and the bazaar again. Build something that does the job; release early and often; allow users to extend what you’ve built.
None of this is new.