Google: Trust Us
Evan is responding to the comments about Google’s exclusionary weblog crawler. Basically, he admits that he has no clue what’s going on, since he’s not in the loop, but then tries (very weakly) to defend Google’s behavior. As if the deliberate RSS breakage and cease-and-desist letters were not enough to make Google’s intentions perfectly clear.
Personally, I paid little attention to the latest exclusionary behavior from Google, because I think it is futile anyway, much like the early transgressions. Too much of the world’s content is in RSS now. They would ignore it at their own loss, and they are not crazy. Giving away webmail storage at break-even to hurt Yahoo and Hotmail is crazy like a fox; ignoring RSS is just plain crazy.