Never Assume Malice When Stupidity Will Suffice

Dave Winer complains about Apple’s photocasting RSS being broken and while I’ll agree that it’s a shame Apple didn’t put more effort into interoperability, it’s also a shame Dave had to end with:

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

As if Apple have any reason to kill RSS when they’re going out of their way to leverage and promote RSS. How about letting the plain facts be enough criticism instead of having to tack on insinuating comments just to beat up the story?

It’s not just that line either, Dave jumps to the assumption that Jobs is lying about them using industry standard RSS – most likely, Jobs just has no idea there are bugs in the implementation that cause it to differ from the technical specification. He was told it was RSS and that RSS is an industry standard (in this case de-facto) format for syndication, that’s what he repeated. CEOs of big companies rarely have time to fully test the software they have to talk about and promote so they assume the software meets the requirements spec that was drawn up for it. The spec for Apple’s photocasting almost certainly includes something the effect of “adheres to RSS spec” and “interoperates seamlessly with all the most popular feed readers”. Those features were specifically mentioned in the keynote and even the page you get when you go to the example feed in Firefox sates the photocast works with “other photo-compatible RSS reader[s] for Mac, Windows, and other operating systems”.

There’s more to this story than first meets the eye and probably some technical limitations that Apple are trying to work around to provide a seamless experience.  Just because they screwed it up doesn’t mean that was their intention.

Update: Changed the title to actually be relevant.  My first reaction was substantially different to my final thoughts on what to write about.