the onda

The humble and most underappreciated client of the RSS revolution, Google Reader, has just launched an interesting feature: the ability for a user to subscribe to a page that doesn't natively emit a syndication feed and still receive changes as a stream of events.

As RWW reports, this is not the first time a product has attempted to do this (and more significantly, geeks have been scraping webpages since the dawn of Perl), but the fact that it is Google, doing it at Google scale, is particularly relevant.

For a while now, we've had available both the page-oriented web that is best suited for humans to consume, and the stream-oriented publishing formats that blogs and RSS pioneered and that Facebook and Twitter popularized. In the middle, a few services have willing to take the step of translating the torrent of the stream into something page-oriented that people can consume in a page format (look at Techmeme or Tweetmeme for two great examples), but the promise of the programmable web is to lower the required investment in making a million such efforts not only possible, but easy.

And there lies the rub: Google providing any webpage's diffs as a stream is bound to lower the barriers to anyone looking to build on top of streams to create their own page aggregators. This was the promise of Yahoo Pipes (or Google Mash Editor), two products that couldn't overcome the complexity of incorporating content that was not readily digestible in one of a few syndication formats.

It's easy to imagine the possibilities, especially because we've got a good set of aggregators that scrape e-commerce, travel, and finance sites already. However I suspect the real promise of this particular Lego brick will come in scraping public data websites that have previously been ignored, either at the local level or around particular topics.

And I for one would much rather see Google spending engineering cycles in useful extensions to the web like this one than on bashing it out with Apple over the next dominant consumer computing device.