How to Atomize (or de-atomize) Syndication

Joi, Dave, Shelley and others have been talking about how Microsoft might approach the Syndication feud.



They're all missing how 'embrace and extend' works. Imagine I'm a developer who wants to write a tool that can read and write to weblogs. I look into it and discover that there are multiple conflicting versions of syndication formats, and multiple inconsistent blog posting APIs.

I have to pick which ones to start with, and implement multiple parsers and an outer API to talk to the various blog types available.



If Atom or Microsoft or RSS 2.0 or whomever wants to win converts in the future they need to solve this problem for would-be adopters. Here's how to do it (for clarity, I'm using Atom as the putative protagonist, largely because I can then use the pun 'Atomizer').



Take Postel's law seriously.



Implement a web service at atomizer.org that, presented with a feed URI in arbitrary format, returns a usable feed in Atom format. (For extra credit, provide an API in mainstream languages that does this transparently when parsing fails).



Implement another web service there that presents the atom API fro arbitrary blog URI's. It bridges the Blogger, Userland, MT, LiveJournal, etc. APis transparently.



Given such services, the choice should become obvious for all future developers.



Will any of these players pull this off? I don't know.