One of the problems I have at work is that I have 3 applications open for participating in online community. I have Outlook for email, RSS Bandit for blogs & news sites and Outlook Express for USENET newsgroups. My plan was to collapse this into two applications by adding the ability to read USENET newsgroups to RSS Bandit. However recently I discovered, via a post by Nick Bradbury that
Hey, just noticed that the Google Groups 2 BETA offers Atom feeds for each group. To see feeds for a specific group, use this format:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/NAME-OF-GROUP/feeds
Here are a few examples:
So I'm now at a cross roads. On the one hand I could abandon my plans for implementing USENET support in RSS Bandit but there is functionality not exposed by Google Groups ATOM feeds currently. I can't view newsgroups that aren't public nor can I actually post to the newsgroups from the information in the feed currently. I see two options
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Implement a mechanism for posting to newsgroup posts viewed via the Google Groups ATOM feeds from RSS Bandit. Don't worry about adding USENET support for the case of people who want to read newsgroups not indexed by Google.
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Implement the ability to view and post to any USENET newsgroups using RSS Bandit. This may also include figuring out how to deal with password protected newsgroups.
The Program Manager in me says to do (1) because it leverages the work Google has done, it requires minimal effort in me and doesn't require significantly complicating the RSS Bandit code base. The hacker in me says to do (2) since it provides maximum functionality and would be fun to code as well. What do RSS Bandit users think?
PS: Does anyone know how Google plans to deal with the deployment nightmare of moving people off of the ATOM 0.3 syndication format? Given the recent political wranglings between the W3C and IETF over ATOM it is clear that we won't see a spec rubber stamped by a standards body this year. There'll be thousands of users who are subscribed to Blogger & Google Groups feeds who may be broken whenever Google moves to the finalized version of ATOM. Will Google abandon the feeds thus forcing thousands of people to either change their aggregator or upgrade? Will they support two potentially incompatible versions ATOM?