Do you use a dedicated RSS reader, and subscribe to dozens (or more) feeds? Do you have feeds channels dedicated to work/professional topics? If so then it looks like you are a minority and maybe an early adopter for a technology that will never catch on with the wider market.
I share some of the disillusionment expressed in this blog post. I have been a long-time FeedDemon fan, especially since I discovered their version for the Blackberry. Now I can read feeds while waiting for the train, ‘clip’ things for later reading, then open my desktop client and work through the clippings. If I’m on the road I just use the Newsgator web site. The portability is great. And it is not that hard to figure out — so why hasn’t it caught on in more places?
The other big advantage to RSS is data portability. Forget the RSS readers, the RSS feed itself makes it really easy to re-purpose content in other contexts. For instance this blog also update my Facebook profile via RSS. I’ve created a number of web pages that draw on content in externals blogs, all via their RSS feeds. On the data source side the RSS feed is pretty easy to implement, and on the display side pretty easy to consume. The latest version of Dreamweaver even has some dedicated tools that ease the whole process. You do need to work around the cross-side scripting issue, but there are plenty of PHP scripts to help handle that.
My hope is that RSS (and other XML standards like Atom) won’t go away, even if the dedicated feed readers don’t take off. I think the real future is in the behind-the-scenes applications that take advantage of the feeds to re-use content and display it in ways that meet the needs of multiple audiences.
R.I.P. Enterprise RSS – ReadWriteWeb
We are amazed that this software hasn’t caught on, but we presume it’s attributable to the radically new paradigm RSS represents, poor engineering on the part of the software makers, customer apathy and fear of acronyms (like R.S.S.).
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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