Filling Your Web Needs With RSS

Computerworld - You may have heard a new buzzword making the rounds. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, could change the way we aggregate and read information from the Web and give companies a new way to deliver their messages directly to customers. But an ongoing standards battle may hurt the adoption of the technology before it really takes off.
RSS is simply an XML document, often called a "feed," that describes content generated from a Web site. This could be news, press releases or almost any other type of content. The beauty of RSS is that with a program that can read and aggregate different RSS feeds, users can access the content that's relevant to them without having to surf the Web or subscribe to e-mail newsletters. It's literally information at your fingertips. There are a number of free RSS readers, but my personal favorite is NewsGator, an aggregator from NewsGator Technologies that ties directly into Outlook and lets me read news there and post material to my personal weblog as well.
RSS gained popularity as a byproduct of the weblog phenomenon. (Most weblog programs let you generate RSS feeds automatically.) But it's gone well beyond being just a cool way to read weblog posts. Today, leading publications (including Computerworld) let you subscribe to their feeds and get information updated as it's posted, without any effort on your part.
Originally, RSS was Netscape's answer to Microsoft's Internet Explorer "channels," which could push data to users' Windows 98 desktops. The technology languished for some time until UserLand Software Inc. created its own spec (confusingly, also called RSS) as part of its pioneering work in weblog technology.
Today, there are several flavors of RSS from vendors such as Google (which owns the popular Blogger family of Web sites) that threaten to fragment the marketplace and hold RSS back. This is a time when technologists need to come together, put the past behind them and support a single standard. It's truly a case where less development would result in more for the marketplace.
If the market fragments the current RSS 2.0 standard, that would have a huge impact -- but probably not enough to kill RSS 2.0. I believe Microsoft or another large player would get into the game and come up with a variant of RSS. Any MS-RSS that might emerge as a consequence could be the basis for syndication in some future product. Microsoft's variation on RSS might even be compatible to some degree with the upcoming Windows operating system, code-namedLonghorn.
What the RSS players need to remember is that users don't care about RSS or any other technology. They care about the value of syndicated content. The vendors should heed the words of the head of Black & Decker, who once said that customers don't buy the tool maker's products because they need 1-inch drills; they buy them because they need 1-inch holes.
Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups at Jupiter Research in New York. Contact him at michael.gartenberg@mindspring.com. His weblog and RSS feed are at http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg.