Its a small thing, but we’ve built support for shared OPML into Tucows Start Service. The function has been available for a couple of weeks, but I thought it was worth mentioning here because I think OPML has actually got some legs as a format. I resisted the tempation with Start to build in support for 500 different microformats, feed standards and emerging Web 2.0 doohickeys. I fell prey to this temptation with Blogware, but quickly learned that while most developers like to talk about standards support more than they like to implement it. I would say that 90% of the “standards” we implement with Blogware don’t get used by anyone today…RVW, OCS, ATOM, FOAF, the list is almost endless, almost all dead two or three years after the fact. This time, I didn’t want to get stuck holding the bag, so we simply didn’t implement anything that real people weren’t using.

I made two exceptions to this – LiveClipboard support and OPML support. OPML has been around for a while and Dave Winer’s renewed interest in the format really sealed the deal about our support. Given his past evangelical success, I don’t think he’s going to disappoint me. Unfortunately, at the same time that we implemented shared OPML, we also removed our support for LiveClipboard. Why? Well, 4 or 5 months after its announcement, no one has really done anything interesting with it. Yeah, I still think it solves some of the more gnarly problems with web app usability, but only on a theoretical basis. Until more sites start using it in appreciable material ways, I’m not going to blow any more of my attention span trying to figure out how to get more users to adopt it. My time, my team’s time, is better spent building features that real customers have actually asked for.

As far as the OPML support goes, we’ve also supported OPML import for almost a year, so this new release makes the circle complete. My shared OPML is available here.