Google gets a patent on reading lists

Google gets a patent on reading lists: "Google will probably protest that the patent they filed on reading lists was defensive. But it's a bad patent, based on an 'invention' that was already out there, being discussed openly on Scripting News at least a year before they filed it. If you can subscribe to a feed, why not subscribe to a collection of feeds? And when an item is removed, you no longer are subscribed to it, and when one is added, you are now subscribed to it.


Google should explain to the RSS community how they supposedly invented this and what their process was. If it turns out that we had prior art, they should tear up the patent and apologize from trying to hijack something that doesn't belong to them.


I worry about big companies doing awful things because they do them. It's dangerous to have Google control so much of the RSS infrastructure, from Feedburner to Google Reader to Blogger. They could easily pass information between those systems without sharing the information publicly. They could, right now, deliver features to users that competitors would be locked out of. All this built on ideas, formats, protocols and know-how that were contributed by others without any limits on how they could be used. And now this patent.

"

HowTo: Implementor's guide to rssCloud

HowTo: Implementor's guide to rssCloud
Implementor's guide to rssCloud

This document shows how RSS 2.0's element can be used to connect a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages.

We walk through an implementation.

By design, each of the elements can and hopefully will be replaced by all variety of tools for different platforms, commercial and open source, for desktops, laptops, netbooks, cell phones, wrist watches, car computers, whatever.

Our focus has been on simplicity, being open (subject to replacement and user choice) and scaling.

I've provided an implementation of rssCloud, running on Amazon EC2, discussed, as an example, throughout this doc.

MarshalSandler.com » Scripting News: 9/10/2009

Image via Wikipedia

MarshalSandler.com » Scripting News: 9/10/2009