The problem with photocasting

Lots of hay has been made this week over the Mac only nature of photocasting. Apple is being bashed from all sides for using photocasting as a marketing ploy for Safari. It seems, however, that a few relevant facts may be left out. Here's what I've been able to determine.

In addition to working with the Safari and iPhoto duo, photocasting also works well with Thunderbird on Windows and on both platforms Bloglines has no problem reading the feed and showing it.

Apple is checking for an RSS capable browser and if you don't have one you'll see a message suggesting Safari works well. What are they supposed to suggest instead? A competitor's product? Safari has some of the best river of news style RSS display of any browser on the market. Sure you can do the same thing with NetNewsWire but it eats CPU cycles and spits them out to get warmed up.

What is being overlooked is an interesting new setup. If you come to visit a feed with a non-feed reader why should I not set my web server to show you the content you will be able to see? Browser detection has been in use for years to accommodate mobile users with their WAP browsers. Why not do the same with web feeds on the desktop. Something to take a look at once the Drupal 4.7 release hits the streets.