Comment by jacquesm
2 days ago
Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS. Companies don't like you to be in control of how you use their data.
2 days ago
Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS. Companies don't like you to be in control of how you use their data.
Indeed. Though I guess a better example would be: it'll go the same way as REST APIs (which happen to be fundamentally the same thing as MCP anyway).
Remember the time when REST was the new hot thing, everyone started doing API-first design, and people thought it'll empower people by letting programs navigate services for them programmatically? Remember when "mashups" were the future?
It all died before it could come to pass, because businesses quickly remembered that all their money comes specifically from denying users those capabilities.
REST did not die. it mostly became a mechanism for business managers to separate concerns between frontend and backend.
i wonder if mcp will become, "let the project people talk to the backend team and the frontend team separately and the AI will figure out the middle"
This is already the way my company wants to go.
Put MCP in front of every GET API, and let teams explore on their own
I don't know about that. Zapier and automation apps were huge before agents, or even for integrations for Slack. There is definitely a big portion of tech products that have mutual benefits by providing good APIs to be in the same bubble
Yes, that's my point - Zapier is exactly where this is heading. Automation as a service, requiring you to enter into contracts with everyone, and limited only to what said services feel like enabling. This is the opposite of what we hoped APIs will be, and the opposite of what people hope MCP will be.
> and people thought it'll empower people by letting programs navigate services for them programmatically?
I don’t think that concept died because of nefarious business-related reasons but rather that building true HATEOAS APIs is hard and the utility of “automatically navigable APIs” is quite limited. It’s a neat trick to point a generic API client at an API and crawl it automatically, but hardly anyone consumes APIs that way. We read the API docs and construct integrations suited to the task at hand, manually.
Right. But there are hardly any useful APIs you can just use, with only an account on a service and willingness to read the docs. Everyone is exposing as little functionality as possible, and even that only under special conditions that make them useless for regular people. APIs are primarily a way for businesses to partner these days.
REST and MCP aren’t fundamentally the same thing. MCP is JSON-RPC, and includes special methods that allow you to enumerate the various functions and their signatures. REST apis have none of that, and use different verbs. JSON-RPC is always POST (which kills cacheability for common reads, unfortunately).
Isn't RSS a smashing success? I changed readers after Google Reader died, but otherwise, my feeds have been working seamlessly for nearly 20 years. I rarely meet a site with updates that doesn't support RSS.
Until recently, many sites had RSS functionality because the infrastructure they are using provided some of automated RSS generation. Also, many sites stopped providing "full-content" RSS feeds, but gave pointers to the website itself to drive clicks.
"Real" RSS gives you the whole content. The blog platform I use does this, for example. They are not greedy people and just want to provide a blog platform so, they use the thing as it's supposed to be.
Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, craigslist, eBay, Amazon, etc.
> Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS.
Meaning what? RSS remains ubiquitous. It’s rare to find a website which doesn’t support it, even if the owners don’t realise it or link to it on their page. RSS remains as useful as it ever was. Even if some websites only share partial post content via RSS, it’s still useful to know when they are available (and can be used as an automation hook to get the full thing).
RSS is alive and well. It’s like if you wrote “this will go the same way as the microwave oven”.
The built-in RSS reader in Firefox was removed. (But extensions exist to add RSS reader to Firefox.)
Google killed Google Reader. (Other products exist you can use instead.)
Facebook removed support for RSS feeds. (You can replace it with third party tools or API calls.)
It’s not dead dead, but it did seem to lose some momentum and support over time on several fronts.
> It’s not dead dead
It’s not dead, period. Not dead, dead dead, dead dead dead, or any other combination.
Yes, some integrations were removed, but on the whole you have more apps and services for it than ever. The death of the behemoth that was Google Reader was a positive there.
Maybe fewer people are using it, but the technology itself is fine and continues to be widely available and supported by most websites, which was the point.
Maybe Facebook and Instagram don’t have RSS access, but you can’t even navigate two pages on them without an account, anyway. They are closed to everything they don’t control, which has nothing to do with RSS.
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These products were phased out because most people weren't using them.
RSS is and always was very niche. There are always claims that companies killed RSS for nefarious reasons, but I think the truth is much simpler: Companies stopped putting resources into RSS tools because very few people use them.
The people who use RSS are very vocal about their support, but they're a small minority of internet users. Even I started with an RSS reader but found myself preferring a set of bookmarked favorites to the sites I wanted to read, even though they're not equivalent in functionality. For my use case, a random sampling of websites that I could visit during times I had 15 free minutes to read something was better than collecting everything into one big feed, even though I would have guessed the opposite before trying both ways.
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It doesn't matter. Soon the AI will be able to click and scroll like a normal user. It's going to be another arms race.
Maybe, but the market structure has inverted and the big guys now want to be in the intelligence layer, not content. (Content is being commoditized.)
Google can still sell ads as long as they own the eyeballs and the intelligence that’s engaging them.
Google did not want you using RSS because it cut out Google Search.
Unless it becomes useful enough that customers will go through the hassle of switching to companies that are "AI-ready".