RSS is HOT

These days, a lot of action is taking place on the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) front. Quite a few startups have sprung up playing around with feeds, mashing them ,etc to come up with a number of different products/services. We have already seen start ups integrating existing services such as instant messaging, blogging, commenting, etc with the concept of feeds to deliver an interesting breed of utilities.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good article here detailing the major action in 2007 while Jeff Nolan highlights the action most likely in 2008 here. Even Newsgator, which targeted companies with their enterprise products made their desktop readers freely available to the general public. Surely a sign of the of RSS gaining mainstream recognition . Meanwhile, an interesting concept utilizing an individual’s RSS output file (OPML) is Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML). I would recommend these links for beginners.

Coming back to the original discussion, all this action validates our belief that RSS would be the prime source of information(anything that the user is interested in) in the not-so-distant future. This includes social networking updates, blogging and may be even email or any other source of communication. Victor Hugo’s quote springs up in my mind

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

Hope we reach there in time!