RSS Comes to the Enterprise

2005-09-23T03:03:00-07:00

As you may have guessed from this site, I am hardly a person you would expect to praise Microsoft for their technical insight and forward thinking. Like the story about generals, they always seem to be fighting the last war, with their late arrival to the Internet and Web being a current and recurring example (now, rather than Netscape, it’s Google that is seen as their greatest threat). However, occasionally they get a thing right along the way, and I feel honor-bound to note it in this case.

Over at The Register, there is an article RSS Goes To Work In Windows detailing the ways in which Microsoft has jumped onto the RSS bandwagon with Windows Vista (shipping next year, maybe?). For those of you following along at home, Microsoft is planning to ship a built in RSS-store capability in Windows which will allow any application compiled against the appropriate API to be an RSS aggregator and manipulate feeds programmatically. This is a nice touch, but hardly a stretch yet.

What is interesting to me is that Microsoft discusses their plans to have the next release of their Dynamics CRM software to create RSS feeds that can be syndicated to. Other server applications with RSS extensions in the works are Sharepoint Portal, Exchange, and possible Office. As the article quotes it

“CRM is one of the first examples of how we see RSS unlocking data in the back end data systems,” Amar Gandhi, Microsoft Internet Explorer group program manager, told The Register during a recent interview. Microsoft revealed plans to RSS-enable its CRM last week at the Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC)

Chris Caposella, vice president for Microsoft’s information worker product management group, told software developers attending PDC Microsoft believes RSS would be transformed into a platform that embraces business applications.

That last paragraph was something I’d never see. Because honestly, I never thought people would “accept” RSS in the Enterprise. While we can joke about how meaningless the term Enterprise Software is, RSS is definitely not it by any usual sense of the term for several reasons:

RSS in general has no typing or generalized schema. It’s really a schema for news stories that can be generalized for events, but it’s not for serialization of complex typed objects like SOAP.
The RSS model is extremely simple. Pull requests over HTTP. No pushing, no notification mechanism for new content.
In itself, RSS has no security for content (I know, Atom has support for encrypted content), and access security is generally only done through obscurity (giving an individual user a feed with a long unique token in it, maybe unguessable, but not unsniffable)
Finally, RSS is not really controlled. There are no authorization lists, no ACLs or DRM or other such mechanisms to control who can subscribe and where they can do it.

That said, I think all of these aspects are why RSS has succeeded so widely in the world of the Web2.0, while SOAP has largely failed to gain traction. In fact, considering that one of SOAP’s biggest backers is Microsoft, this RSS announcement reveals what a disappointment SOAP has been as a web service platform. So, why is a company like Microsoft so willing to reject one of its software initiatives and embrace RSS so, in effect giving RSS an mantle of legitimacy in the Enterprise it might’ve taken years to achieve?

I think that if we want to consider the biggest Web2.0 trend for the coming year, it won’t be the proliferation of AJAX or increasing maturity of Web Frameworks. It’ll be the proliferation of RSS into every aspect of server-side content. One of the greatest things about Flickr and Del.icio.us is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for every possible page. And since pages are dynamic content (combinations of photos, groups, tags, users), what you are really subscribing to is not a list of documents, but the latest matches for a search (ie, “find me all photos tagged Italy by this user”). And it’s easy to do, regardless of the site.

One of the cool features of Mac OSX Tiger’s Spotlight (and probably Windows Vista) is the ability to save searches as virtual folders which can be opened and browsed like regular folders in the Finder. This is a really cool way to manage ever-growing content. Now, imagine being able to do similar functionality with server-side content, and suddenly the appeal of RSS makes a lot of sense (admittedly since RSS usually shows only the last 20 items or so, there is a you snooze, you lose problem, the general metaphor holds). Most of the Web2.0 is about taking the applications of the desktop into the browser, this brings the web back into the machine and applications.

No wonder Microsoft suddenly has the RSS Religion. Done well, this might be their best chance to keep people hooked into Windows and all their software products for business. Of course, they are trying to do the old embrace, extend, extinguish trick, but this time it may not fly because Microsoft’s not in the driver’s seat for the technology. That said, I must admit that Microsoft has made a smart and proactive move for the future here, and I think it’ll benefit them well. But more importantly, it lends a large amount of authority to RSS in the Enterprise, which makes RSS and the Open Source Standards-Based community the biggest winner of all. At Alacra, we’ve felt that RSS will be much bigger in the Enterprise for a while. It’s neat to see we’re not alone.

"Crystallized Attention"

2005-04-19T23:26:00-07:00

The digerati are all abuzz about Fred Wilson's recent seed funding for del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking/tagging service. What's especially interesting is that Fred himself concedes he has no real idea of what the business plan for his new investment might be (see Funding Del.icio.us):

The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know. This was a seed investment and none of the investors put up very much capital. Joshua retained complete control of the service and is going to focus on making it better. That is all anyone wants to see happen right now. In time it will become clear what the business model should be. And there are a number of them to choose from for sure.

Now, this has attracted some snarkiness and derision from those of us who remember the dot-com boom and the days the hype subsequently died. But I think Fred Wilson is acting smart here. It's hardly a stretch to see that del.icio.us is a wonderful nimble platform for people to build things and there are some great web technologies at work behind the scenes too. It is becoming more feasible to work within a browser and choose sites like you would normally evaluate software packages. So, it's easy to see that Del.icio.us is likely to become part of the future user's toolset (like word processors and such today) and I think Fred's seed investment is mainly to ensure that when that big thing happens he has VIP access.

I found this entry of Seth Goldstein Media Futures: Alchemy to have an excellent analysis of why sites like del.icio.us might turn out to be more than just toys in the long run (it's also where I got the quote in the title about del.icio.us). Seth seems to be a very smart guy, and he is the person who introduced Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us to Fred Wilson:

This is consistent with what I see happening online, where meta-data (information about information) is creating significant economic value, from the many millions of Google and Overture keywords to the emerging class of Flickr, Del.icio.us and other tag-driven systems. Our browsing, clicking, searching and tagging behavior are the base metals which alchemists like Josh are turning into precious datastores.

I would underscore that what we are seeing here is a change in the Internet model of consumers. In the early days, the idea was that advertising revenue would drive the business and consumers were valued as passive eyeballs, essentially a broadcast model in a new medium. But as we have seen in Wikipedia, with Flickr, and with Del.icio.us, there is real stickiness in sites that let users create, moderate, and control the content. And there is a real market for services that allow people to manage the metadata for things in their lives without imposing extra restrictions. So, Flickr makes photo sharing and classification easy, but more importantly, it makes it fun. Ditto with del.icio.us for bookmarks. Yes, eyeballs are still important, but I think part of the Web2.0 experience is valuing the brains of the user as well.

Of course, Seth has noted all this too and suggests "it would seem that there is simply no way to create long term sustainable value online without engaging consumers in the act of media production." And yet, he notes that even the seemingly open players like Yahoo and Google are creating their own complementary suites of products so that users are limited to creating only within a particular company's sites. Will this turn the web into another AOL vs. Prodigy situation, or will there be independent and cross-provider toolsets for us to use? I suppose time will tell.

Nimble Code: Tag delicious

RSS Comes to the Enterprise

"Crystallized Attention"