I read an article at News.Com yesterday about Google "spurning" RSS in favor of Atom. Google, which acquired Blogger last year, is only allowing former paying customers who were already publishing their blogs in RSS format to use RSS going forward. New feeds can only be in Atom format.

I fully support their right to offer their service however they wish--it's free after all. When I read the article, I couldn't quite make sense of the decision though. By dropping (almost) RSS, they narrowed the potential audience for their feeds significantly--at least for now, till more tools implement Atom support.

I'm not going to argue which format is best...at least not today...but would ask, is there a good reason to support only one format?

After a bit of thought, I think the answer is yes. I also think that there is a good reason to support both (or all, if we count RSS as 2 formats and let Info Bite into the discussion).

Reasons to support only one:

* Because you think one is the format of the future, and will be the one worth troubling with later.

* Because you think one is superior to the others, and want to help it spread by omitting support for the others.

* Because one costs less to support than another or all. There are many ways that supporting only one could reduce costs, especially for a company that publishes an innumerable number of feeds:

a) Less storage space is required to cache less formats.
b) Choosing a smaller format saves bandwidth.
c) Choosing the one with the API that best helps to reduce bandwidth saves bandwidth.
d) Caching proxy servers use less bandwidth by caching only one feed for their clients instead of two or more.
e) Maintaining code for one is cheaper than for more than one.

* If you're making money off of website visitors but not feed readers, you may prefer for less people to be able to access the blogs as feeds.

* You either dislike Dave Winer, or like to read his complaints.

Reasons for supporting more than one:

* If you guessed wrong at which is the format of the future, you're already up and running on the winner when it wins.

* Even though you don't make money off of feed readers, you do make money off people who scan the feed and then come to the website.

* Being available in more formats gets you known to more people.

* You either like Dave Winer or are uncomfortable in a world with conflict, and don't want him to have a reason to complain.

The News.com article quoted Dave Winer's reaction to Blogger's decision: "They're breaking users, including people who aren't using their software." A while back, reading some of Dave's comments on the RSS 1.0/2.0 split, I found myself agreeing with a lot of points he made and thinking maybe he wasn't as out there as I'd come to believe. Sadly, little that I've read since then has inspired the same feeling. It's not as if Blogger was DDoSing sites running MoveableType or anything. They're not "breaking" anyone. They're not victimizing people who use other software. They're just not going to expand their support for a format that, for whatever reason, they ... have chosen not to expand support for (couldn't think how to finish that sentence!)

Would I be happy if they continued support for RSS? Yes. Will my tools support multiple formats? Yes. Do I begrudge their contraction of RSS support? Not at all. That's their decision. If RSS supporters drop Blogger in droves and they suffer for it, then oh well--it must have been a bad decision. But until their actions start reaching into my life and hurting me, it's neither my business to tell them what to do, nor to begrudge their decision to do what they think best.

By the way, for anyone wanting to publish their Blogger blog in RSS, my program, Grouper Evolution, has a plugin that will do it for you if you've got a PHP enabled website. So maybe I am biased against Blogger's supporting RSS! ;-)