Eqentia

As an RSS and news junkie, I’ve been on cloud nine in the past 48 hours because of the excitement surrounding Dave Winer’s rssCloud implementation. In an email this morning, Fred Wilson asked me to explain why this was so special and important. And Dave Winer who has already gone to great length at taking us with him on his journey to unravel this feature also asked me if I could explain my understanding of the impact of this capability.

So, let me try to simply answer the “So what?” of the rssCloud.

# 1 It’s a new feature.
First, it’s something new for RSS. Although this hook was originally developed and used in 2001 (I used it in 2003 in my Radio and Manila sites), it was only available on a limited basis. With its current re-incarnation, it is bringing along the excitement that accompanies new technology features- and that’s usually a great impetus for increased momentum in market expansion.

The recent barrage of online discussions over RSS’s future had placed some doubts or cloudiness over its evolution, in the eyes of some users, not because of anything of its own making, but partly because some people got too focused on novelties (e.g. FriendFeed, Twitter, Lifestreaming, Real-Time status updates), and RSS had lost the perception of being new or having latched on to “real-time” or “social media”.

Today, the perception that RSS was stale or outdated is gone.
rssCloud is that new shiny object that is now crowning RSS. Enjoy it.

# 2 It’s faster, but that’s only the beginning
The end-result is that rssCloud will allow an RSS feed to propagate faster, from the “creators” to the “consumers” of content. Previously, if you wrote a post, it wouldn’t be visible to another Reader unless the Reader or user decided the ping your RSS URL address (or via Feedburner) in order to see if there was a new post. With rssCloud, the feed will notify the “cloud” which in turn updates right away anyone who is a subscriber to that RSS feed. So, it’s like a constant push of content, so that content will always be there, waiting to be read or published. Let’s hold this thought until point #4 below.

# 3 Getting on-board: it’s a two-way street
Let’s be realistic. The fact that rssCloud is available now doesn’t make all content available in real-time right away. The feature has to be implemented on one side by the Blogging and Authoring platforms (e.g. Wordpress, TypePad, Posterous, CMS’s, etc.); and it has to be implemented by the “receiving end”, i.e. the Readers and Aggregators (e.g. Google Reader, Eqentia, Zemanta, etc.). So, it’s a 2-way street. Therefore, it will take some time to be fully adopted, but that’s OK. Note that there’s a somewhat equivalent method using Google’s PubSubhubbub (which Google Reader is already supporting). So, until everybody is either on rssCloud or PubSubhubbub, RSS will have 2 speeds: regular and pubsubhubbub/rssCloud. Again, that’s OK, as long as the trend is moving in the right direction.

#4 Instant publishing for the masses: more than 140 characters at a time
Twitter showed us the excitement of instant gratification via seeing something we just typed 30 seconds ago instantly appear for everyone around the world to see. If I were to explain Twitter using an RSS paradigm, I would say it’s like a web-based window into an RSS feed. You enter something and it gets registered into an RSS feed, but I would have to stop there. I couldn’t say it would propagate to various publishing destinations automatically, and I couldn’t say that it was real-time. Now, with rssCloud, I can say that.

Dave Winer hinted at what this means by outlining 2 use cases that Twitter desktop publishers could tackle in order to push the envelope further and build on rssCloud. Dave suggested that a Twitter desktop or mobile app should allow the user to intermesh rssCloud-enabled feeds into the Twitter mix. That’s a brilliant proposition. In essence, this would break open the Twitter real-time paradigm and make room for RSS to also be a catalyst for real-time.

Imagine if you could enter longer than 140 character posts via Twitter client, and let that content be transported via rssCloud to the end of the world, the same way as a Twitter post does today. Bingo.

You’re probably thinking about where this is leading- well, this might cannibalize a part of the Twitter streams that were going to Twitter just to beat the real-time crunch. That’s OK. To each content, its own mechanism, whether it’s tweeted or cloudified will not be the issue.

So basically, we’ll have another distributed “Instant publish” mechanism (via RSS) across users/publishers, in addition to Tweets. Great.

5# Make room for innovation as a way forward
rssCloud is good from a perception point of view as much as from a technical implementation point of view. I think that rssCloud has in essence validated Google’s PubHubSubbub approach, and as a result of having 2 non-competing methods now, they can both prosper valiantly, in the name of Real Time.

My company, Eqentia has been all about innovating in and around RSS, from Day 1. We touch close to 14,000 RSS feeds. Daily, hourly, minute by minute, we’re manipulating, indexing, analyzing, semanticizing, publishing and re-propagating content that came to us via RSS; and we produce highly customized content streams via public or private portals.

And it’s great to be in an RSS-based business. Now, we will support rssCloud on both the receiving and sending ends (we receive RSS, and we send processed, customized RSS).

To showcase this, and to show you that the Future of RSS is bright, we have quickly put together a news mega-aggregator on that topic. You can read all about the Future of RSS here, or follow us on Twitter at @rssfuture, or sign-up and get a daily email on anything that has touched RSS while you were sleeping.

I’m glad that we can now shift this discussion away from RSS’s survivability, and onward towards the real innovation in and around RSS. This isn’t about ‘my feed is faster than yours’, but rather about end-user solutions that solve real needs.

Let knowledge and ideas move freely, speedily and with abundance, thanks to RSS.

Technorati Tags: Aggregation, Dave Winer, Google Reader, RSS