The Future of Feeds

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:12:00 -0800

Earlier this year, I made a New Year’s Resolution to write more postings to the blog, but I have failed abjectly at that so far sadly. January is sadly a busy month for me, and I usually don’t feel like coming home after a long day to stare at a computer screen some more. But occaisionally inspiration strikes, and I feel like sharing some thoughts I have about the future of Syndication via RSS and Atom feeds in the next few years.

I have to agree with my company’s CEO Steve Goldstein when he says that increasing RSS/Atom adoption will be one of the big trends in the information industry in 2006. Speculating wildly, I think that 2006 will be The Year of RSS and Atom. And so, I’m going to make a few bold predictions of my own about the state of syndication and the software industry. To avoid spending even longer without posting to the blog, I have decided to not bother with research, so if something I have predicted has actually happened already, be sure to make a snarky comment about it to me below. Thanks. And now here are big things I see happening in the next year or so:

Mainstream Feed Adoption – Currently, most of the sites producing feeds are still blogs and news sites –- those for whom the article paradigm within feeds is a natural fit. However, non-newsy sites like del.icio.us and Flickr have earned a lot of buzz not just for their front-end interfaces but for their innovative and pervasive use of feeds everywhere and using syndication for non-article content. But this is still under the radar of the typical Internet user for now. I think this will change this year. I expect a major online site to follow suit this year and provide syndication of their data in a similar fashion. For instance, I would not be surprised if Amazon began to offer feeds for user wishlists or upcoming recommendations or music alerts. That would rock.

More People Will Embrace RSS, But Still Not Know It – A survey from last year by Yahoo! revealed that only 4% of Internet users knew what RSS was, but this will most certainly change. The name is obviously somewhat to blame (there’s a joke that if it were called SpeedFeed more people would use it), but I think it’s not the real problem. In truth, most people just don’t care. For your typical web user, the Web is a toy more than a place to siphon information from; they are therefore not exactly vexed enough by the slowness of visiting sites to want to setup an aggregator. Instead, I think some different killer app beyond mere aggregation will be the only thing to make most people want to use RSS. I have no idea what that app might be, but I’m sure one of you could think of something awesome.

RSS Is A Terrible Business Though – For companies that produce or sell content, RSS will be a good fit, providing additional ways for users to access the site and contributing a small boost in sales or page visits. But companies in the RSS software business (particularly online aggregators) will have a terrible time. There are just very few barriers to entry for competitors, and the whole we’ll make money through advertising model seems so very pre-boom to me. That said, there are still some promising markets for companies doing RSS software. Software that allows filters or other mechanisms for mitigating information overload from feeds will find a market. Bridges from the pull-based mechanism of RSS/Atom to push-based messaging services like SMS, Email, or IM will probably also do well. And of course, it would be smart for makers of web analytics software to also look at measuring conversions and clickthroughs from feed links.

Syndication Will Drive REST Web Services – One of the common complaints leveled against REST-based Web Services is that the simple model of REST does not specify the XML representation for data (unlike the case of XML-RPC and SOAP). This will never officially change, but I think it will become increasingly more common to see REST Web Services that return RSS-like data for searches. Indeed, throw in Amazon’s OpenSearch extensions for RSS and you have support for presenting pagination within RSS documents. The practical upshot of this is that programmers can use the exact same code for RSS, Search Engine Plugins (if any other engines besides A9.com support OpenSearch_), and REST-based Web Services. More significantly, this makes REST more compelling to these programmers, since supporting SOAP’s data encoding would require supporting an additional data format for searches and more code to implement. Similarly, the arrival of the Atom Publishing Protocol will also bring awareness of REST Web Services to a wider market of people who will be using it without even knowing it.

Feed Extensions Will Get Wider Support – As RSS/Atom grows in its usage, it should be possible to find more aggregators and process that also support the more popular extensions to feeds (these are normally specified within the document in a separate namespace). I think a few extensions will become essential in the years ahead (and I don’t even know if they exist currently!): support for threading of RSS items (for feeds based on email lists); partial encryption of RSS documents to be decrypted in the reader (would allow banks to offer feeds for instance); geographic tagging for marking stories (see the breaking news/photos on a map). In any event, I think good aggregators will show in some fashion all tags embedded in the feed so that users could search or filter based upon them.

Syndication in the Enterprise – Finally, it is obvious that RSS/Atom will become more common within corporate intranets as well. And the credit for this belongs to Microsoft of all companies. Mainly, by placing RSS within all aspects of Windows Vista, Microsoft will drag all sorts of big IT Departments into accepting RSS as a solution for messaging and event notification. This will in turn make them more likely to also accept other solutions based on syndication. In fact, I’m optimistic enough to think that B2B Syndication-based products will do better than B2C (remember that vexing 4% recognition rate from above; CTOs can mandate use in their companies). Smaller companies will be quick to embrace the immediacy of RSS and larger companies will also enjoy it for Windows Vista integration.

Atom vs. RSS2.0 Holy Wars Won’t Matter I know it vexes some readers of this posting that I’m using RSS sometimes as a shorthand phrase for RSS2.0 or Atom-based syndication. And I agree with them that Atom is technically superior while RSS2.0 has better market share. But my ultimate feeling is that the differences between the two for the consumer will be largely academic (like caring about whether your audio player is playing MP3 or AAC), since any good aggregator or processor should just be able to handle both formats effortlessly.

I will probably follow up on some of these points in more depth anon, but feel free to comment and quibble in the comments section below. I am no industry expert, but I do so like to make guesses about the business. And I’m curious what you think as well. Check in next year and we’ll how well they turned out.

Nimble Code: Tag atom

The Future of Feeds