Summary: Yes Microsoft is a Web 2.0 company, because their goal is to use the Web as a Platform. The difference is they'll use the Web as a Platform via millions of Windows-run 'devices'. That'll be their interface into Web 2.0.
The Yahoo Search team has a vision called FUSE - which stands for Find, Use, Share, and Expand. Apparently it represents the use of search "to fuse a myriad of services and applications". Basically, search is the center of the universe for Yahoo - and Google too.
Compare this to Microsoft, which has at the center of its universe the Windows OS. Microsoft is currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Windows Operating System (OS) and in a recent Microsoft press release Jim Allchin, the Group VP of Platforms, updates us on Microsoft's vision:
"Our initial vision was "A PC on every desk and in every home." Now we’re envisioning a PC for every person and in every room – almost in every nook and cranny."
Well I don't particularly want Microsoft to be in all my nooks and crannies. They've certainly targeted the nooks and crannies of many an Internet company over the years (Netscape especially)! But seriously, what this vision entails is that Microsoft want to have Windows running on a multitude of Internet-connected devices in the future.
Back to Yahoo's search-centered vision. John Battelle writes:
"...at the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me - search is not just about a web index. It's about my interface to the world."
Yahoo and Google are both basically Internet services companies - and no doubt both sees its search platform as the center of a "my media" universe. How does this compare to Microsoft, who are still essentially a device-dependent company?
While the main 'device' over the past 20 years has of course been the Personal Computer, Microsoft recognizes that in future other devices will be more important - mobile, television, so-called "media centers". They may still call them PCs, but these devices will be much more varied than in the past 20 years.
Yes Microsoft is a Web 2.0 company, because their goal is to use the Web as a Platform. The difference is they'll use the Web as a Platform VIA millions of Windows-run 'devices'. That'll be their interface into Web 2.0. Microsoft is doing this instead of going the direct route - as Yahoo and Google are - through search engines and all the usual Web 2.0 technologies (RSS, Web Services, APIs, etc).
Oh Microsoft will do things in those domains too (e.g. start.com), but the Windows OS is at the heart of Microsoft's Web 2.0 strategy.
The way I see it, Microsoft really has no choice but to try and dominate Web 2.0. Much as they corralled Web 1.0 via Windows and the Internet Explorer browser.
So will the center of the Web 2.0 universe turn out to be Longhorn, the next generation Windows OS? Well if Microsoft gets its new OS onto millions and millions of Web-connected devices over the next few years, then they'll essentially control all those "my media" interfaces to the Web 2.0 world.
Don't count Microsoft out of Web 2.0 yet.
Now that I'm part of
the new Silicon Valley Watcher network, reporting
on RSS, I've got to thinking about how I fit into this new world of
blog-journalism. Here's the beginnings of my theory on this...
Back in the 70's Tom Wolfe coined a style of news writing called New Journalism, which was very
influential for me growing up. Although I never did formally train to be a journalist, I
always identified with Wolfe as a writer. The title of this post, btw, is a result
of combining the name of Tom Wolfe's manifesto and the title of Michael Lewis' classic 90's Internet non-fiction book:
The New New Thing. Witty huh? :-) Lewis is another of my favourite authors, btw.
So I've been reading a lot of great stuff on the Web about how journalists are adapting to the New Media world of the Web, in particular how they are adjusting to bloggers and blogging technologies. This post I'm writing, off-the-cuff, approaches the topic from the other side: a blogger adapting to the world of journalism. I'm just a blogger, yet I'm now doing reporting on Silicon Valley Watcher with my new colleagues who are 'real journalists' (my phrase).
Here's the piece of insight I was searching for, in pondering this post: Specialization will come via niche, not skill. Terry Heaton wrote that in the comments section of Jay Rosen's blog - note that both come from the world of journalism.
Terry's practical point was that journalists need to be "multimedia skilled" these days. I imagine in the same way that so-called 'Generation M' (or 'C') are "media multitaskers", to quote a recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The main point though is that being a Specialist in the 21st century is increasingly about focusing on a niche - moreso than having specialist skills, such as (for example) reporting and editing. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying specialist skills aren't still important. Obviously they are. But I do think that specialist skills will no longer be the key differentiators in 21st century journalism.
What will make quality journalism stand out in this century is the specialist knowledge that the reporter/writer brings to it - which includes being close to the news source (ideally being what we in the IT industry call a 'user') and being able to drill deeper than someone outside that niche can do.
Of course being multi-skilled means to be skilled in reporting and editing - as well. But it's no longer enough *just* to have those skills. Those people who focus on a niche will be able to build up a deeper, and hence potentially more valuable, store of knowledge than those who skim across dozens of niches.
Having said that, Michael Lewis (the author I mentioned above) is a great example of someone who is able to insert him or herself into a niche topic for a period of time and come out with a compelling story. So there is still room for a highly skilled reporter/writer to inject themselves into a variety of niche situations and report on them as well as - or better than - people already in those niches. I can't imagine anyone else writing a better and more insightful story about baseball than what Micheal Lewis did in 2003.
So in some cases specialist skills (reporting and writing in Lewis' case) are more important than specializing in a niche. I wonder whether that will be the norm in this century though, as it was in the last? I don't think it will.
This is all forward-looking for blogs and journalism in the 21st century. Sometimes though it pays to look back to the Good Old Days. When thinking about what makes a good journalist, I like this traditional (romantic?) definition:
"The ideal newsroom protagonist, judging by fiction and film from the first half of the twentieth century, brought reporter and detective together in one person. The reporter and the detective both were considered hard-working and highly moral, even when breaking the law. Both insisted on remaining loners and working by their own idiosyncratic rules. And both mixed with high-hatters and hoi polloi; they, like the heroes of Vern Partlow's song 'Newspapermen,' reveled in 'corruption, crime and gore.'"
Well apart from reveling in corruption, crime and gore - that describes me, on my Web 2.0 and RSS beat. Perhaps I will get to revel in gore when the next phase of the RSS Format Wars hits. :-)
I suspect this is just the start of an ongoing series of posts on this topic, by this reporter. I haven't finished my train of thought and I will probably change my mind later... but in the new new tradition of blogging, I'll post what I have now and see who continues the conversation.
NB: Just discovered some author has already used the term "The New New Journalism". Oh well, nothing is ever new in this world... ;-)
I thought I'd post this before Phil Pearson gets to it ;-) A New Zealander, Chris Liddell, has just been appointed to the job of Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft, making him the third most powerful person there (behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer). Mr Liddell commented:
"Obviously it’s a great privilege for me personally but I’d rather stress that this is a great thing for a New Zealander," he said.
"We’re doing great things on the world stage at the moment and I’m just really happy to feel like I fit into that pattern."
This is big news in New Zealand and rightly so. While not quite up there with Peter Jackson's achievements with Lord of the Rings, it does show that us kiwis can excel on a global platform. Andy Lark, who I had the pleasure of talking to a couple of weeks ago, is another kiwi who made it to the top rung of an Internet company (Sun Microsystems).
Is this Web 2.0? In the sense that I'm a kiwi and using the Web as a platform for making my own little play on the world stage - yes ;-)
I've been trying to figure out a way to do a daily Web 2.0 update with links - without being, you know... one of those blogs that just links to other blogs. What I'm looking for is something in-between del.icio.us and a 'real' post.
My 'Web 2.0 News' posts from 1-2 weeks ago were a bit too long and time-intensive to write. So what I'm looking for is something akin to what Zeldman does, e.g. Linkos. The freshmaker.
He has the ingredients of what I want to do:
1) Witty post title
2) 5 original-ish links, 1 with a quote and 4 with one-line Zeldman comments.
He gets extra marks for a fresh take on an old story (dogs playing poker) and being a bit arty in his comments ("Project d’art").
Steve Gillmor describes the kind of thing I'm looking for as a "post-del.icio.us fraglet style" (although he may've been high when he wrote that... I'm kidding).
So anyway, I'd be grateful for your advice...
a) A daily Web 2.0 News/links update, in the Zeldman style.
b) A straight daily dump of Web 2.0 news/links - a la my Saturday morning effort.
c) An individual post for each story/link (which really would be like everybody else and it'd probably result in 4-5 short posts per day... I'm not keen on this option).
d) Forget the links dude, just stick to your knitting - long posts with original analysis and writing.
e) Another option??
Please be so kind as to leave a comment :-)
This week: Macrobe/Adobemedia, sports RSS feeds, Google and Yahoo MojoWatch, Mobile Web 2.0 woes, Dan Gillmor's Web 3.0.
This was all over the Web Tech part of the blogosphere this week and the general feeling was one of surprise that two Web Design heavyweights have joined forces. Are they challenging Microsoft, trying to make up lost Web 2.0 ground, readying for a Mobile Web play? Probably all that and more. Hmmm, perhaps the biggest question is: will they give Marc his name back? :-)
From a practical perspective, I'd like the new Macrobe company to create a version of Photoshop that is as user-friendly as Fireworks! ;-)
I'm big on topic RSS feeds, so I was interested to read Rich Skrenta's analysis of the most-subscribed-to topix.net feeds in Bloglines and MyYahoo (mostly MyYahoo it seems). What stood out for me was the number of sports feeds in the top 20 list - 10 by my count. It doesn't surprise me that sports feeds are so popular with MyYahoo users, given an analysis earlier this year that suggested MyYahoo is the most popular RSS Aggregator for gridiron fans.
Also sports news is a prime candidate for RSSification, given that it's information people are passionate about and want regular updates of.
This week both Google and Yahoo announced their first quarter earnings - and Google came out the clear winner. It's fair to say that Google, with the earnings announcement and new features such as My Search History, has managed to take back a bit of the mojo that Yahoo has been busily acquiring in 2005. David Jackson summed it up well:
"Google's net income of $369 million was significantly greater than Yahoo's net income of $205 million. Terry Semel's claim that Yahoo is the best positioned Internet company is curious, particularly given that Yahoo's fastest profit growth is in search."
I still think Yahoo's media strategy will pay huge dividends in future. And don't forget that Google has PR issues that need to be addressed. So I'm not reading too much into the market glory that Google continues to bask in.
Russell Beattie isn't happy about the current state of the Mobile Web:
"Companies need to *forget* their experiences with WAP 1.0 in the early part of the decade and realize five years have passed and the public is now ready for the mobile web."
John Battelle agrees and adds:
"On the one hand you have an open platform, the web, that sports a robust ecology with all sorts of innovation and competition. On the other hand, over in the mobile world, you have this carrier-driven crap that is driven by one thing and one thing only: the carrier's desperate desire to lock you in."
My 2 cents: On the producer side, the Mobile Web is only a platform for the telecomms companies that control it. On the consumer side, there is the Digital Lifestyle Mobile Jigsaw to contend with - getting your mobile phone to connect with all the other pieces of the Web. So I'm afraid the Mobile Web has a ways to go before being truly Web 2.0.
This week it's Dan Gillmor's "Web 3.0" post. Only please don't call it Web 3.0, because I don't want to re-brand my blog ;-) But I'll forgive Dan for that, because he also liberally uses the term "read/write web" :-)
Basically Dan's theme is that version 1 of the Web was read-only and version 2 (which we're in the middle of right now) is read/write. He goes on to say:
"The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we're learning how to program the web itself."
He references APIs, web services and the whole 'Web as Operating System' concept. While I agree with all that, to me it all comes under the Web 2.0 banner - i.e. the Web as a Platform.
John Battelle: "In the Web 2.0 world, it matter less that you have a major media company behind you, what matters is if your voice and point of view are considered valuable by your audience."
PaidContent.org: Weekend Readings on Web 2.0 - hey Rafat, since you hate the term 'Web 2.0', I'm available to do this feature for you if you like ;-) Seriously...
Tom Foremski meets Doc Searls: "Doc is right, blogging should be easy. It should be as easy as writing an email to a colleague or buddy. It's not easy breaking stories, writing news, interviews, analysis and features--the type of journalism that we also have on SiliconValleyWatcher-but the blogging part, like this entry, should be easy."
Chris Nolan: The Stand Alone Journalist is Here...
del.icio.us analysis: Feedback, Motivation & Sociality in an Online Tagging Service, by Ericka Menchen
Fascinating stats from topix.net: "Topix.net has 187k subs total on My Yahoo, compared with 7k on Bloglines. My Yahoo is *huge* in rss." Susan Mernit was the one who got the ball rolling on this and she comments "Larger implications of feed packaging and redistribution continue to be interesting...both from an ad perspective (think of the revenue these feeds could carry and who gets the $$) and from a licensing/permissions perspective."
Yahoo is cut down as Google soars - Marketwatch turns the tables on Yahoo and waxes lyrical about Google's finances.
Steve Outing: New Kingpin of Online News?: "Thanks to blogs, aggregators, RSS feeds, and other options, fewer and fewer readers are entering news sites through home pages. So it's time to adjust."
Josh Porter has feedback for Rojo, the new(ish) RSS Reader on the block.
Adaptive Path: It's a Whole New Internet - this is why I want Josh and I's Digital Web article to be published asap... we finished it a week or so ago and it's due out 4 May.
Team RSS - can I have one of those badges? :-)
David Weinberger: "In the ninety seconds MSNBC gives over to blogging, they want to pair A-Listers into a he-said/she-said report on a Major Topic." - so David quit. Good on ya mate.
Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia
If Information Flow can be likened to a river, then lately I've only had time to occasionally splash water on my face as refreshment. Which is to say, I've been dipping in and out of the Information Flow that is my Bloglines account.
This is the reason why the daily Web 2.0 News feature I started last week has since escaped my grasp and quietly floated away downstream... my current workload prevents me from scooping up enough Web 2.0 water to deposit daily into my main blog bucket, to quench the thirst of my readers. But don't worry, the tap that is my del.icio.us account continues to have glorious Web 2.0 H2O pumped into it, so that it may be used for my weekly Web 2.0 Wrap-Up splash-around. And I may start squirting items of Web 2.0 news at you, as stand-alone posts (if I can restrain myself from babbling on, like I'm doing now).
You might surmise from all this that I haven't had time to go for any decent swims in the Blog River? While that's true, I have been paddling around in two large eddies of memes. One was the latest speech by Associated Press CEO Tom Curley, in which he expounded on his brilliant 'containers' theory. The other is a series of posts by Seth Goldstein - about Internet alchemy, algorithms, APIs and automata.
(ok, enough with the river / water metaphor)
I'm still absorbing the Curley speech, but here are some highlights:
"Yesterday, we were entirely focused on fashioning our content to fit certain containers – the morning or afternoon newspaper, the 6:30 evening newscast, and, most recently, the Web site.
Today, users want content to flow free of those containers to the the desktop, the cellphone and, soon, the set-top box in the living room."
...and he follows up by saying nobody is in control now, except for the users. I have much more to write about Curley's speech, but I'll save it for another post(s).
Seth Goldstein's series of posts about "Media Futures" is stunning. Here are some tasty extracts:
From Automata: "When you aggregate all of these individual reading and writing agents, it looks more like a landscape of cellular automata than a tradition publishing model."
--> his point being that next-generation Internet content will be much like cellular automata - "dynamic, member-generated, and excitable".
From Alchemy: "...how we describe something is in itself an act of creation, beyond simply representing some external object."
Goldstein goes on to identify some Internet alchemists and "alchemical moments in the history of the World Wide Web". He riffs beautifully on Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us, Marc Andreesen's web browser, Yang and Filo's Yahoo, Bezos' Amazon, Omidyar's eBay, and Page and Brin's "simple search box".
If you have any interest in the future of the Web - and I presume that you do if you read my blog ;-) - then go check out Curley's latest speech and Goldstein's inspired writing. I'll follow-up with some thoughts of my own, when I get a chance to dive back into the river and have a decent swim ;-)
Today dawns in New Zealand as the 20th April 2005, which happens to be the 2nd birthday of Read/Write Web. Yes, two years ago today I posted my first blog post on R/WW (although I'd tinkered with blogging a year or so before that). Over the past 2 years blogging has brought me so much - my writing genes have well and truly flowered and just this year I've finally started to convert my blog's mojo into real-world opportunities.
Which brings me to a couple of bits of news: firstly I'm now a member of the Silicon Valley Watcher team, Tom Foremski's online publication covering the business of Silicon Valley. I'm honoured to be working with Real Journalists such as Tom and Richard Koman. I'll be covering RSS for Silicon Valley Watcher, with a new blog that'll launch soon. Here's a taste of what to expect. Tom wrote a little more about this in a recent article, appropriately entitled The Future of Journalism. Bloggers and journalists working together, that's what it's all about!
The second bit of news is that I'm working p/t with Marc Canter on writing specs for his company Broadband Mechanics. He made a plea for help this weekend, so I put my hand up and got the gig. This is an exciting opportunity for me, because writing software specs is right up there with journalistic writing in terms of my career goals. They're complimentary, because to write about Web Technology I need to keep my software design chops up-to-date.
So I'm stoked to be working with both Silicon Valley Watcher and Marc's crew! Also a big thank-you to ThePort Network, who I'm thrilled to have as a sponsor here on Read/Write Web.
Did I mention I'm still holding down a full-time day job and committed to more improvements to Read/Write Web? Oy, it's gonna be a busy few months! But I love challenges :-)
Back to the past... my first post on R/WW, two years ago today, was entitled The Read/Write Web. It still stands up pretty well, even though so much has changed since then. After the first year I did a review [pt 1, pt 2] of my favourite posts from that year on R/WW. In a similar vein, here is a selection of some of my favourites during the second year:
The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites - published in Digital Web Magazine April 2004 (btw my next DW article, about design for Web 2.0, has been completed and is ready for publishing)
Weblogs as Avatars: some thoughts - this was a reasonably off-the-cuff post from May 04, but it turned out to be quite popular.
A Theory of Synchronicity for the Web - some mind-bending stuff from June 04.
Mama don't let your baby grow up to be a Generalist - heh, good fun.
Analyzing Bloglines Subscriber Stats - from July 04, this started me off on my blogosphere stats and analysis kick...
New Strategy for Read/Write Web - some navel-gazing circa Aug 04 that indicates how R/WW was changing over this time period.
Why Yahoo! + RSS = Good Thing - from end of Sept 04. Possibly heralded the beginning of my Web 2.0 fascination...
Interview with Lucas Gonze of Webjay - Oct 04, my second Slashdotting. It was fun to collaborate with Lucas too.
Design for Data: Thoughts - from Nov 04, this began a rich vein of thought that I'm still mining...
Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 1: Web 2.0 - it was a real thrill for me to talk to Tim O'Reilly, one of my tech heroes.
Bob Dylan Chronicles and Blogging for the thing's sake - I mention this because I got an email a couple of weeks ago addressed to Bob Dylan, I presume due to this post. :-)
Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 2-8 January 2005 - the start of a new weekly feature on R/WW, which has turned out to be a generator of a lot of good feedback and whuffie.
Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS - I'm selecting this because it's one of the themes I'm exploring this year.
Web 2.0 Definition and Tagging - Feb 05 post that gets to the nitty gritty.
Collaborative Feedburner Stats Project - Mar 05. I will do an update on this in the near future.
JupiterResearch Blogging: RSS Readers: Part 1 - March/April 05. I enjoyed analyzing the analysts.
So that's a selection of some of the posts I've published on Read/Write Web over the past year. There's plenty more where those came from! ;-)
This week: Aggregators trendy, Yahoo News vs Google News, Rupert Murdoch on the Mount, RSS Readers in bloom, new kinds of Kool-Aid.
The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and analyst firm Outsell released a report on the Information Industry this week. They estimate the industry is worth $250 billion. What stood out like a sore thumb is that "General Aggregators, Distributors & Services" was up 25% from 2003 to 2004, the largest percentage growth among the segments tracked.
With preliminary 2004 Revenue of $33,002 million, General Aggregators is now the third-largest segment in the Information Industry - behind News & Trade ($88,970 million, 8% increase) and Education & Training ($34,574 million, 7% increase).
Now it's not entirely clear how the SIIA and Outsell define "General Aggregators, Distributors & Services" (presumably you have to pay for that information). In any case, it's a fair bet that it'll make more inroads into "News & Trade" in the 2005 year...
I wrote about the Yahoo News re-design this week. Basically I was very impressed with their RSS adoption and use of topic feeds. Yahoo also recently introduced custom RSS feeds for Yahoo News. So they're making all the right moves, as I noted in yesterday's post RSS and The Big 3.
Meanwhile Google News has some issues - they're being challenged by Associated News (AP), they're inconsistent about which news sources they allow onto their pages, and they rather strangely don't offer RSS feeds.
What happens when the high priest of mass media preaches the Gospel According To Jeff Jarvis? The media faithful listen intently, that's what (and perhaps pray). This week aussie media tycoon Rupert Murdoch delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Quoth Rupert:
"What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.
Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them.
They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it."
Amen to that brother!
There are a lot of RSS Aggregators out in the market right now. Just this week I saw two new names: YellowBrix and AggRead. Rojo recently went out of beta and BlogBridge was released to the wild too.
Given all the competition in the RSS Aggregator market, it's really important for new entrants to differentiate themselves to users or target a particular niche market. Another thing new players should focus on is solving some of the crucial issues in RSS aggregation - for example filtering out duplicate results (when a number of people link to the same thing and it turns up multiple times in your Aggregator).
Sometimes it helps to step back from the hype, take a deep breath, and get a little perspective. That's how I felt when I read Avi Dronamraju's post called The Aggregation Kool-Aid. In it he cautions that although we should appreciate "the power of aggregation", we need to move beyond that and "solve relevance/matching problems".
I agree. It's time for the next level of RSS Aggregation products and services to step up. We need to find ways to filter out the rubbish from our topic feeds, make it easier for non-geeks to subscribe to feeds, discover better methods for delivering personalized information. All these things and more are still searching for a solution ;-)
I've been following what the 3 big Internet companies have been doing with RSS and I largely agree with Dave Winer's recent assessment:
"Yahoo is dashing in front, with Microsoft close behind. Why isn't Google in the race?"
Yahoo has been by far the most proactive company of the 3 this year. Microsoft has shown glimpses of what they're plotting - my favourite so far was the start.com prototype RSS Aggregator integrated with MSN Search.
But Google hasn't done anything with their Blogger unit and they seem reluctant to add RSS functionality to their product line - e.g. Google News and indeed the Google search engine ('subscribe to this search', anyone?) OK, there's a hint of an RSS Aggregator in a new feature being tested for Gmail - Web Clips, it's called. Maybe that's a sign of things to come.
Today I found out a bit more about Microsoft and RSS. Evan Williams blogged a dinner he and 7 other bloggers had with Jim Allchin, a major Microsoft honcho who is responsible for Windows, .NET and "new media technology". Robert Scoble set up the dinner. I found this bit from Evan to be especially interesting:
"One of Jim's repeated statements was that he wanted to bring "this stuff" to the
masses. I asked for clarification because, in a lot of Microsoft's talk, they speak of
RSS and blogging as the same thing. He agreed they weren't the same thing, and it seemed
to be RSS he was talking about implementing in a variety of ways throughout Windows
(e.g., built-in readers, automatic feed generation from a variety of lists...). While
Microsoft does have a blogging tool, that's MSN—not Jim's department."
(emphasis mine)
This is another hint that Microsoft will build in RSS functionality as part of the plumbing for their next OS (Longhorn). It was clear from the start.com prototypes too that Microsoft's strategy with RSS is to integrate integrate integrate. They want RSS to be baked into their products and particularly their OS, so you don't need to download web apps or subscribe to web services like Bloglines.
Yahoo on the other hand is more about utilizing RSS as a media and content enabler - giving My Yahoo users more content to choose from, letting Yahoo News users dive into their niches, enabling mobile users to access content via RSS on their phone, etc.
So what's Google up to with RSS? Or Atom, as the case may be. If I was to guess, I'd say they want to harness RSS. Most of their huge take of advertising revenue comes to them via webpages - their own pages, plus external webpages that use Google Adsense. So Google wants to ensure that revenue doesn't get siphoned off if they make content available via RSS.
It's interesting that the Gmail 'Web Clips' feature mentioned above currently has adverts alternating with the content (according to Ev). So Google is actively experimenting with ways to monetize RSS.
Once Google has gotten a handle on the revenue-generation options, then they'll commit to RSS and roll it out to the users.
