December 15th, 2004
Could trusting Google be blind faith?
Scripting News publisher and RSS shaker-and-mover Dave Winer diplomatically bit the hand that fed him with a recent blog entry that can be summed this way: Unless there are some changes in the way the company conducts itself, perhaps throwing in a dash of transparency (the new trendy buzzword), users of Google’s services should not be as cavalier with their trust as they are being. Through its growing portfolio of services — everything from Web search to desktop search to blog publishing — users of Google are entrusting a significant amount of their personal information to the company. While Winer falls just shy of saying "Google cannot be trusted," he held few punches in his criticism of the company that provided financial support to a blogging conference that he organized. Says Winer in his blog:
"Google today is as dangerous as Microsoft, and I wouldn’t bet on their trustworthyness, not without a lot more light having been shed on this. The technology industry is built on a foundation of arrogance and disdain for users. Google is too. You may not have seen it yet, but I have."
In February 2004, in support of an alternative syndication specification known as Atom, Google withdrew its support for the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification from blogger.com (the popular blog publishing service it acquired in February 2003). While the move was applauded by some, it angered others, including Winer, especially because, at the time, many of the popular client-side technologies that were being used to digest RSS feeds could no longer process the feeds coming from Blogger.com. Existing users of Blogger.com who, like me, still wanted to syndicate their content with RSS were forced to find a complex workaround. In my case, the workaround was to use Feedburner, which, through an option called SmartFeed, produced a single feed that was digestible by both Atom and RSS readers. Said Winer in a phone call earlier today, "You see? That’s what I was talking about when I said ’arrogance and disdain for users.’ If you wanted people to use your technology, you wouldn’t throw crazy roadblocks in their way, would you?" Fortunately, now that most client-side feed readers accept both RSS and Atom, an added layer of complexity to deal with compatibility is no longer necessary. But, to the extent that was not the case when Google made it’s decision, on that same day in February, Winer opined:
They’re breaking users, including people who aren’t using their software. There is a lot of implicit trust in the RSS network, an assumption that vendors will behave rationally and will care for users. Any participant can break us, as Google is proving. But I believe in the fabric of the community. Either Google will fail, or Atom will be the new syndication standard. But…don’t look to the past for their motivation, that’s not what it’s about. I am absolutely sure Google has an aggregator in the works. And by taking control of the syndication format, and trying to eliminate RSS, they will control the whole blogging-syndication-search space.
One month later, Winer pitched a plan for merging Atom and RSS. But, to date, although advocates of the two specifications say that the doors are still open, the two have yet to find common ground under one standard. Likewise, in June, Google revisited its prior decision to deactivate RSS support on Blogger.com, and mulled the idea of offering support for both Atom and RSS. But, based on my experience with Blogger.com, Atom remains the only option — a decision that has fewer ramifications today because of the way most feed readers can accept either format.
In today’s blog, Winer says where things need to head:
"Net-net, Google has become such an important company that their public statement of ethics needs to be more than three cute words, and they need to have a systematic way of handling and responding to challenges. If they won’t do this, I don’t see how we can keep extending our trust of them."
In my phone call with him earlier today, Winer said the three cute words are "Don’t be evil" and offered more details on how Google got off on the wrong, evil foot and why he sees promise for redemption. "What they did, by replacing RSS with Atom, was evil." said Winer. "RSS wasn’t doing them any harm. They should have been behind what we [the RSS community] were doing. We were big users of their product. When I saw the move against RSS, I thought, ‘This is how you treat your friends? What are you going to do when you have enemies?’ " Winer went on to describe how Google’s withdrawl of RSS support was antithetical to the goals of its search business. "They’re in the business of searching HTML text, and RSS presents more structured information, which can only be an advantage to search engines because they have to make some kind of sense out of the stuff that doesn’t have a structured schema."
But, in his blog, and on the phone, Winer was careful to mince words. According to him, all hope for trusting Google is not lost, and the company has before it a golden opportunity to rise above the "arrogance and disdain for users" that characterizes the technology industry." On the phone, Winer told me "It was amazing how quickly Google turned around in private conversation and said that they were going to undo a lot of that stuff. They’ve got some better people now and I believe that they mean well." Meanwhile, referring to Google’s privately stated intentions to not be evil, Winer cuts Google no slack in reminding us that, for all that’s been said behind closed doors, "They haven’t done it yet." What exactly "it" is, Winer won’t say. But what he did say is that "I have to give them a chance. I can’t say anything more." At least not until tomorrow, when Winer said he’d have a follow-up.
