Dave: Steve is a crusty old visionary user of software and a Quixote of ideas.

Steve: Dave is a crusty old visionary maker of software and a Quixote of ideas.

Neither of you are suitable windmills for jousting.
Join arms against the windmill “dragon” of vested interest that seeks to captures us in their monetary schemes to control the conversation.

THE GILLMOR POV

Steve Gillmor speaks from the point of view of a “User”
of client software: to detect and interact with
“news and ideas”. His move from a dependency upon an RSS
Reader to a “Track-based” Twitter view was empowering as
a vision of a “Realtime” web conversation.

When Twitter disabled “Track” Steve spent months trying
to encourage a developer to re-build Realtime Nirvana.
Everyone told him… just wait for Twitter to turn it back on
after some re-engineering of the site… still wating I think.

Friendfeed and some others got pieces of the realtime experience
back but we’re still waiting for the perfect solution with
latencies measured in seconds and not minutes.

THE WINER POV
Telling Dave Winer that RSS is dead is akin to playin’ the dozens
w.r.t his mama. Not the best way to get his attention on
a software problem.

RSS is an API and a format for messages. Programmer can easily
see that comparing an API (or format) to an application makes
no serious sense. It’s comparing an envelope to the postman in the
domain of snailmail.

Steve is saying… that waiting for the mail is a pointless way to
get your news. RSS latency is his main issue. He updates a blog and
doesn’t see the readers see or react for minutes. He just won’t go
back after the high of realtime twitter for stimulus response.

Dave’s RssCloud offers developers an extension to the RSS API’s
that can feed the Gillmor Jones for “news” that’s really fresh…
like s teaming bagel fresh from the boiling pot.

When RssCloud’s start appearing in Applications that Gillmor can use the
maybe two good friends will start to remember that “Users” must wait for
developers to catch up to their needs and Developers must always seek to
understand what the critical user is trying to say.

When Winer and Gillmor connect with their visions: we all seem to benefit and experience
another bubble of enthusiasm (if not wealth).

Mr. Gillmor I’ve sat in a room for about two hours with Dave Winer to listen to what his vision is for CloudRSS. It’s something that’s very much in he beginning stages (i.e. developers are just starting to build proof-of-concept examples as we speak) — so it’s unfair of you to shoot it down by confusing it with RSS (it’s a related concept but still different) or even by seeing it as something that’s of the same generation as Twitter. What Dave is talking about is a next generation specification. Or to use a very clumsy analogy: CloudRSS is to Twitter as HTML was to HyperCard. For what it’s worth my own thinking is that unless you sit down and listen to Dave that you can’t fully judge what he’s working on.

Of course that said it would be helpful for Mr. Winer to avoid RealTime Block Syndrome if he really wants to evangelize his new concept.

So apples and oranges, rather than one replacing another.

No denying that twitter works great for fast communication – but I’m not sure RSS was ever really meant for that … it’s more for pushing content from one place to another.

Seems to me, anyway!