The Rise and Demise of RSS

An interesting look at what happened to RSS. What I found interesting was the author’s “moral of the story” about how hard building consensus is (whether it’s in open source software, or even just in a business):

But the more mundane reason [why RSS failed] is that centralized silos are just easier to design than common standards. Consensus is difficult to achieve and it takes time, but without consensus spurned developers will go off and create competing standards. The lesson here may be that if we want to see a better, more open web, we have to get better at not screwing each other over.