Jon Udell, MCP Is RSS for AI:
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.
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.
But, 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.
Like 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.
