A tour of the open standards used by Google Buzz

Google Buzz may have had some privacy issues, but at least they're trying to be more open than Twitter is.

Can someone explain what exactly is XRD and what it is useful for? I'm not being sarcastic, just trying to figure this out.

Besides the examples James Clark gives here (e.g., the likes relation on users and items, associating public keys with email addresses [1]), Google gives some examples at their webfinger page [2]: your office hours, your profile page, etc.

[1] http://salmon-protocol.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/draft-panzer... [2] http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

XML is mentioned way too much on that page :(

Open standards are great, if they don't suck.

To be fair, the author is the James Clark who wrote expat and designed Relax-NG (a decidedly non-sucky XML schema tool).