As I commented on Scoble's post, I believe the Atom initiative is dead in the water despite apparent signs of Google adoption.  That is too bad because the real strength of the initiative is the list of people and companies who have pledged support for the initiative.  As Scoble pointed out, if Google adopts Atom then Microsoft will have to support at least two feed formats and this raises the question of "Why not Microsoft's own format?"  We are heading down the wrong road.

IMHO, the most practical path out of this mess is for the Atom initiative to hi-jack RSS 2.0 and build on it without breaking backward compatibility.  A new spec will obviously have to be written to avoid copyright problems with Dave's version of the RSS 2.0 spec, but people were complaining about the old spec anyway.

As to the Atom API, I won't bitch about it any more if RSS 2.0 is adopted as the core Atom feed format because the feed format is far more important than the API.  This should satisfy Evan Williams since his real beef is with the API.  Yes, there are some issues people have with RSS 2.0 but they can be ignored or worked-around with extensions until later, hopefully much later.

The best part of this solution is that everyone will feel like they got screwed.

Based on ongoing discussion in the atom-syntax mailing list over my Making Atom Happen proposal, most of them are not even taking the proposal seriously.  One even called it trolling.  Hogwash.  If you are doing something that affects my life, I have the right to do something about it.

So it looks like all of us are going to pay for their pride and esthetic obsession: a sin tax over the syntax fetish.  If you want to do something about it, go to the JustSayNoToAtomFeed page at Atom Wiki and add your voice of support.  If we are going to be ignored anyway, lets get ignored blatantly.  It doesn't matter if you are a developer or a user, you'll be taxed so you have a say.