One of the accusations made by Tim Bray in his post I’ve Seen This Movie is that my recent posts about the Atom Publishing Protocol are part of some sinister plot by Microsoft to not support it in our blogging clients. That's really ironic considering that Microsoft is probably the only company that has shipped two blogging clients that support APP.
Don't take my word for it. In his blog post entitled Microsoft is not sabotaging APP (probably) Joe Cheng of the Windows Live Writer team writes
- Microsoft has already shipped a general purpose APP client (Word
2007) and GData implementation (Windows Live Writer). These are the two
main blogging tools that Microsoft has to offer, and while I can’t
speak for the Word team, the Writer team is serious about supporting
Atom going forward.
- These two clients also already post to most blogs, not just Spaces. In particular, Writer works hard to integrate seamlessly with even clearly buggy blog services. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as we do at this.
- ...
- Spaces may not support APP, but it does support MetaWeblog which Microsoft has a lot less
influence over than APP (since MW is controlled by Dave Winer, not by
an official standards body). Consider that many of its main
competitors, including MySpace, Vox, and almost all overseas social
networking sites, have poor or nonexistent support for any APIs.
The reasoning behind
Windows Live Spaces supporting the MetaWeblog API and not the Atom Publishing Protocol are detailed in my blog posts
What Blog Posting APIs are supported by MSN Spaces? and
Update on Blog Posting APIs and MSN Spaces which I made over two years ago when we were going through the decision process for what the API story should be for
Windows Live Spaces. For those who don't have time to read both posts, it basically came down to choosing a mature de facto standard (i.e. the MetaWeblog API) instead of (i) creating a proprietary protocol which better our needs or (ii) taking a bet on the Atom Publishing Protocol spec which was a moving target in 2004 and is still a moving target today in 2007.
I hope this clears up any questions about Microsoft and APP. I'm pretty much done talking about this particular topic for the next couple of weeks.
PS: You can download Windows Live Writer from here and you can buy Office 2007 wherever great software is sold.