Hubris: overbearing pride or presumption.

I think that watching the common syndication format and publishing API evolve is like watching an accident unfold in slow motion - I’m sure that it’s going to end up badly and I just can’t look away. There is a time for evolution and a time for revolution. I think that this was a time for evolution. Unfortunately, now we’ve got a number of folks committed to revolution.

Meddling with RSS was bad enough. At least that had the potential to produce some new applications. Now they’re going to muck around with the underlying XML-RPC API plumbing. Seems to me that this is a case of extremely premature optimization. Is there a paying end user in the world who cares whether they’re using XML-RPC, SOAP or REST?

Weblogs and RSS had some nice forward momentum just a few weeks ago. This isn’t the right time to call a 3 month time out to think things over and rebuild all our tools. Please stop the madness, and let product innovation begin again.

5 July: Don Park points out that if you want some control, join the project. I think they’ve already got too many developers, not enough project managers. I’m hoping that Blogger, Six Apart, and Userland decide to take control of their own destinies and settle on a common API in a preemptive strike. Yes, I am a dreamer.