Saturday, January 27, 2007

What's the difference between newsgator.com and netscape.com?

I recently listened to TWiL 3 featuring Jason Calacanis. It was quite entertaining, but one comment in particular stood out to me. That is when Jason was noting that the webpage paradigm is almost identical to the rss paradigm. In both cases you have a marked up content file delivered by http to some program you have on your computer that knows how to interpret it. Jason's point is that republishing someones feed is just like screenscraping.

So, to follow the analogy, the webpage equivilant of newsgator.com would be a website that basically is an online web-browser with branding; that is a web-browser inside a web-browser. This of course seems ridiculous and redundant and couldn't possibly exist, until I realized it does: netscape.com. When you click "View Story" you get the third party webpage except with netscape branding on the side.

Yes, I understand the technology is slightly different (newsgator.com will download the feed from the 3rd party, process it, and redeliver it to the customer, where as netscape.com simply tells the browser to download directly from the 3rd party). But isn't the user experience the same? Is there a consistent argument that allows Jason to be so angry at newsgator but still endorse netscape.com?

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