Big Guy Bugs

I’ve been playing with Odeo this week, and I must say, there are some nice features to play with. But, as usual… I find bugs…

Mainly with the RSS feeds. Now, in recent talks with Dave Slusher about AmigoFish, we talked about the problem of outputting invalid RSS feeds, and since AmigoFish sort of re-purposes/re-publishes data from existing feeds, it can be quite difficult to clean everything and output valid XML. (Also, I believe AmigoFish is a one-man operation.) But Odeo, aren’t they a (somewhat) big company with many employees and funding and all of that?

I told Dave I’d cut him a little slack on invalid RSS. With Odeo, I submitted a bug report. To be fair, the Odeo feed was valid, but with warnings. The classic “Apple iTunes DTDs/dtds” warning: The prefix “itunes” generally uses the namespace “http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd”

I’m hoping Odeo can fix this as quick as the guys at Upcoming.org/Yahoo! did. Which brings me to my next point… I’m starting to think I should just freelance myself out to Web 2.0 companies as a service that will test, break, validate, suggest fixes, etc. for their sites. Even the big guys constantly screw things up. Why?