Openness that describes the protocol, not the situation

Syndication is the one part of the web that worked exactly as designed. A publisher lists what is new in a standard format, anyone can subscribe with any software, and nothing sits between the two ends. No account, no permission, no company.

It solved distribution completely and did not solve the two things that determine whether anybody keeps doing it.

The first is finding anything. A feed is useless until you know the address, and there is no directory, no search, and no recommendation. In practice people find feeds by following links from other feeds, which works well for anyone already inside the habit and not at all for anyone outside it. The format has no answer to this and never proposed one.

The second is that publishers have quietly begun to resent it, and the argument they are having about full text versus summaries is really an argument about measurement.

When a reader consumes the whole article inside their own software, the publisher learns almost nothing. Something requested the file. That is the extent of it. No page view, no time on page, no referrer, no advertisement served, no way to tell whether the piece was read or discarded.

I keep running into this same problem from different directions, and it produces the same distortion every time. Money follows measurement rather than attention, so the format that delivers the article most pleasantly to the reader is the one that appears worthless in a report, and gets truncated to a two-line teaser accordingly.

Which turns a subscription into an advertisement for the thing you subscribed to.

There is a third development worth watching. Most people who read feeds now do it through one hosted service rather than software on their own machine, and a great many feeds are routed through one intermediary that counts subscribers on the publisher’s behalf. Both of those are convenient. Both put a company back in the middle of an arrangement whose entire virtue was having no middle.

Nothing has been taken away and the format still works exactly as specified. It is just that the parts everyone actually uses have consolidated onto infrastructure owned by somebody, and the openness now describes the protocol rather than the situation.