Fred Wilson has written an excellent post called Thinking About Feeds. It contemplates the emerging best practices for feed management and the market space in general in light of Microsoft’s announcement that they “get” RSS and are elevating it to a platform.
My knee jerk on this is that Microsoft is going to focus on really nailing the “message router” portion of feed management and ensuring that hand-offs between the central feeds repository and the consumers of those feeds occurs in a highest common denominator fashion. They will also ensure that Visual Studio makes it easy to create custom applications around such a model. Microsoft understands that the best way to ensure broad adoption of Longhorn is to hook the developers first, as they drive the ecosystem that will compel consumers and enterprise to toggle over.
In terms of what all of this means to the consumer, Fred covers an Outlook example already, but if you assume that RSS becomes a platform, then RSS becomes more akin to a web service with a set of well formed methods.
Want to create a community calendar of things to do this weekend in SoHo? Set the appropriate tags/parameters, identify your trusted network, and every time a relevant event is added to the calendar you’re custom calendar is updated. There are all sorts of content, advertising and contextual extensions that can be built on top of such a model.
Moreover, imagine a feed being able to carry a rich payload like video and not only automatically associate the content with Windows Media Player, but also add the content to the appropriate play lists. One can envision interesting content programming plays around such an approach (think: About.com in reverse).
Along similar lines, specific to Fred’s queries on third party apps that can differentiate in such a domain, here’s a link to an O’Reilly blog I wrote on an application that I think has some promise.
The key point is that general feed aggregation becomes a commodity. Differentiation comes higher up the stack in terms of creating enhanced viewing applications that differentiate on ease of use, personalization and leverage of social networking algorithms. Working on a longer blog on this particular topic, but this is a start.
