News Orgs and RSS Readers

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Yesterday, Dave Winer described an AHA moment he had after talking to some folks about Google Reader’s possible impending Syncpocalypse. He asks:

“Why isn’t this something a news org jumps on. It’s their business. And for crying out loud — do it with a revenue model. No paywall. Just charge the users for the service. Make this a market. Let’s start building in a non-fragile way.”

I think this is a great idea, and if it gets any traction, I’d be happy to help with what limited time and resources I have.

I’d also like to offer a pair of suggestions to anyone who wants to do this: Clone Google Reader’s API, and support OPML for importing feeds, as many feed reading apps already do.

Cloning Google’s API and supporting OPML would make it as easy as possible for developers and their users to migrate to new services, and would open the market up to real competition, which is sorely needed in this space.

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