One-Click subscription "problem"
Dare Obasanjo
criticizes Dave Winer’s idea to centralize the “One-Click” subscription
buttons that many aggregators have, like Bloglines and Yahoo. Dave
Winer suggests that the leading players here, Bloglines, Yahoo, Google,
and Microsoft, as well as large news agencies like CNN, NY Times, etc. all
get together and implement a system where you click on a generic button to
subscrive to a feed, and then a request goes out to the central server where
your OPML file is located, and it gets updated, this way, any aggregator you use
has access to your OPML file and your subscriptions will get updated regardless
of the aggregator you happen to use.
This problem screams “PRIVACY ISSUES!!”.
Imagine how much companies would pay to get at the list of blogs you subscribe
to, in order to give you targeted ads and such. I’m a religious Bloglines
user, and Bloglines already ananlyzes your feeds in order to suggest other feeds
you might like, and they do a pretty good job of suggesting good feeds, so I
would think that marketing companies could come up with some good ideas based on
your subscriptions.
The smaller issue, to me, is that like Dare says, it
removes the free enterprise from the equation.
The second problem I have with this is that it
aims to stifle an expression of competition in the market place. If the Yahoo!
aggregator becomes popular enough that every website puts a button for it
beside a link to their RSS feed then they deserve kudos for spreading
their reach since it is unlikely that this would happen without some value
being provided by their service. I don’t think Yahoo! should be attacked for
their success nor should their success be termed some sort of ‘problem’ for
the RSS world to fix.
Very well put, IMHO
