Jon Udell, MCP Is RSS for AI:
\n\n\nIt may sound impressive to say “I built an MCP” server, but the mechanics are delightfully trivial — which is why I’m inclined to think of MCP as RSS for AI. The beauty of RSS as a protocol was its simplicity. You can write an RSS feed by hand, or write very simple code to generate one. Writing an RSS reader was the starter project for many a beginning coder. It’s not quite that easy to work with MCP’s protocol, JSON-RPC, but vastly easier than working with, say, the protocols spoken by Fediverse or Bluesky clients and servers.
\n
I need to play with MCP more. I've gotten through the basic \"hello world\" tutorial and hacked together a server that emits random cat facts. That was pretty cool, asking Claude to do \"research\" on cats and vomit a little throwaway essay sourced from that.
\nBut, yeah, it was very simple. In fact, I worried it's too simple. It's kind of a slapdash protocol. But, I think I worried that about RSS when I first saw it, way back in like 1999. I figured I'd have to learn SGML and XML and NewsML (?!?) to do anything interesting with syndicating content on the web. I don't even remember where I dug up references to NewsML, back then.
\nLike Anil Dash notes, \"slightly under-specified protocols that quickly get adopted by all the players in a space are what wins\". There do seem to be similar vibes coming from MCP as we got from things like RSS and XML-RPC back in the 2000s.
\n", "body": "\nJon Udell, [MCP Is RSS for AI](https://thenewstack.io/mcp-is-rss-for-ai-more-use-cases-for-model-context-protocol/):\n\n> It may sound impressive to say “I built an MCP” server, but the mechanics are delightfully trivial — which is why I’m inclined to think of MCP as RSS for AI. The beauty of RSS as a protocol was its simplicity. You can write an RSS feed by hand, or write very simple code to generate one. Writing an RSS reader was the starter project for many a beginning coder. It’s not quite that easy to work with MCP’s protocol, JSON-RPC, but vastly easier than working with, say, the protocols spoken by Fediverse or Bluesky clients and servers.\n\nI need to play with [MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction) more. I've gotten through the basic \"hello world\" tutorial and hacked together a server that emits random [cat facts](https://github.com/lmorchard/botpub/blob/master/bots/CatFacts/cat-facts.txt). That was pretty cool, asking Claude to do \"research\" on cats and vomit a little throwaway essay sourced from that.\n\nBut, yeah, it was very simple. In fact, I worried it's too simple. It's kind of a slapdash protocol. But, I think I worried that about RSS when I first saw it, way back in like 1999. I figured I'd have to learn SGML and XML and [NewsML](https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/) (?!?) to do anything interesting with syndicating content on the web. I don't even remember where I dug up references to NewsML, back then. \n\nLike [Anil Dash notes](https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/20/mcp-web20-20/), \"slightly under-specified protocols that quickly get adopted by all the players in a space are what wins\". There do seem to be similar vibes coming from MCP as we got from things like RSS and XML-RPC back in the 2000s.", "parentPath": "./content/posts/2025", "path": "2025/05/29/mcp-jon-udell", "needsBuild": true, "prevPostPath": "2025/05/28/miscellanea", "prevPostTitle": "Miscellanea for 2025-05-28", "nextPostPath": "2025/05/29/miscellanea", "nextPostTitle": "Miscellanea for 2025-05-29" }