You can take a user to a ‘net protocol, but you can’t make them use it.<\/p>\n
Protocols are being blurred like crazy at the moment, and it’s not clear what’s going to be left when the dust settles and the metaphors are unmixed. Google’s new gmail<\/a> service is basically web-based (i.e. HTML across HTTP) e-mail (typically SMTP), but with threads concatenated in a way that makes them look like Usenet (i.e. NNTP) discussion threads, or blog (i.e. RSS\/Atom\/whatever-ends-up-as-convention) entries. Google’s own Usenet archive (i.e. NNTP feeds presented as HTML across HTTP) is now being experimentally presented as an Atom feed<\/a> (i.e. like a blog).<\/p>\n Something’s going to be left behind, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to be NNTP. Since the web took off, it’s been an increasing puzzle to new ‘net users just what Usenet is<\/em>. People call discussion groups ‘sites’, and ask what their ‘address’ is – by which, of course, they mean the URL – or the ‘URI’ these days, the convention-change also a signal of the blurring between protocols. (And it doesn’t really serve to tell them that the address is news:name-of-group.) What people know, and what they’re comfortable with, is the web. The software they’re most comfortable with, is a web browser.<\/p>\n I think we’ll be left building most things on top of HTTP. It’s really happening already. I’ve no idea what ‘news’ syndication standard (RSS, Atom) will prevail. It doesn’t really matter for this discussion, since they’re both mechanisms which use XML (which is the direction HTML is heading anyhow) across HTTP. Again, it doesn’t matter which RSS\/Atom aggregator software prevails. It won’t be long before the functionality of an aggregator becomes integrated with existing browers. In the end, a blog, or a news feed which uses RSS\/Atom as its form, is just a web-site which updates regularly, and in a particular direction. That’s how they’ll be seen, and it’s how it makes sense to see them.<\/p>\n