users = developers
Quite an interesting interchange today between James Robertson, Scoble and others about the state of blog tech standards. Like many developers, James thinks the legacy specs RSS, MetaWeblog API, and OPML all suck and he's not afraid to say so. Legacy defender Scoble shoots back that he's a user and therefore he doesn't care about specs. Nevermind the fact that Scoble started the conversation by demanding that tools implement a specific spec, OPML. Anyhow, Winer joins in and says, it's a user vs. developer thing and Scoble set that mean developer man straight.
I think Scoble and Winer are right, it's about the users. When you create a data format or netwok protocol specification, your users are the developers who have to implement the spec. In the case of blog tech specs, the users think the specs suck. That's why the many incompatible variants of RSS are being replaced by Atom format and MetaWeblog API is being replaced by Atom protocol.