Syndicated Feeds Waiting in the Wings
Several weeks ago Charlene Li of Forrester Research contacted me to discuss how companies are using secured RSS and Atom feeds. I gave her a lead with some great insider information that I couldn’t provide, and that was that. I have been very interested, however, to see what reports would come of her research. Now I know…
Forrester Research just released two reports: “RSS 101 For Marketers” and “Using RSS As A Marketing Tool“.
One of the statistics generating much discussion is that only 2% of “Internet Households” are using RSS. (One caveat: This doesn’t include people who don’t know they are using RSS, like many MyYahoo users.)
And yet I believe, with support coming from the likes of Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Apple, it seems clear that the Day of The Feed is coming… just not in the immediate future.
This is no surprise — saturation of software-based technology in popular culture takes a long time. I recall a conversation with my boss at the Iona Group in 1995 when I told him we could put our multimedia presentations as Shockwave on an Internet website. The company is now as net-savvy as they come, but back then I had to explain what Shockwave was, what a website was, and what the Internet was. But hey, this was all new stuff, and these technologies relied on early adopters telling their friends and coworkers how cool — and more importantly, useful — the web could be.
Infrastructure aside, all we’re really talking about is HTML and a Web Browser, but the world changed.
These days, there is just too much information out there anymore to have to browse for everything. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could aggregate all your information sources into one easy reader or application? Enter RSS, RDF, and Atom. And now we don’t just have our early-adopter friends spreading the word, we have the likes of Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Apple, and even Forrester Research pitching in.
Now all we’re really talking about XML and a Feed Reader. Time to change the world again.
