[David Strom's Web Informant] 4 January 2010: RSS, the most unappreciated technology of the decade

[David Strom]

Web Informant, 4 January 2010:
RSS, the most unappreciated technology of the decade

Welcome back from the holidays everyone. I hope you all had a restful
and enjoyable break and are ready to get back to work.

In the ten years since Real Simple Syndication (RSS) has been
invented, it has been one of the most significant technologies that
Rodney Dangerfield would say "got no respect." Providing the
connective glue behind most social media, linking various Web sites
for automatically posting content, being able to Webify various other
protocols -- RSS is the tech that most of us now take for granted.

I am not a big fan of the best of the decade type of stories
(especially as the decade isn't really yet over for another year). But
as I was thinking about how far we have come in the past ten years, I
thought I would take a moment of appreciation for RSS and all that it
has done. It is one of those stories of unintended consequences. And
what is ironic is how many of us use it every day without realizing
it, or even knowing what it does to help better our online lives.

Back at the end of 1999, a few computer scientists at Netscape (talk
about underappreciated companies, at least for those of us that
weren't part of their stratospheric IPO), Apple and Microsoft put
together the beginnings of the protocol. Aided and abetted by pundit
and programmer Dave Winer, RSS began to show up in a variety of odd
places, including early Web server software. The early days of RSS
spawned a series of specialty software tools called RSS readers that
enabled some of us to keep track of new content that was added to our
favorite Web sites without having to cycle through them in our
browsers one by one. And that is where things stood for most of the
time, until the blogosphere and the social Web took off.

Well, those RSS readers were probably the biggest pile of mostly
unused software. A few geeks used them, but mostly they were oddities.
I recall giving a presentation in 2007 at the New Communications Forum
to explain RSS to public relations people, and some of the things that
I mentioned then still apply to the technology, such as a way to
quickly scan information, be the first on your cubicle block to find
out something, and supplement email as a way to send information to a
lot of folks quickly. I will post these slides to
Slideshare.net/davidstrom so you can take a look for yourself if you
are interested.

Just as a side note: the site Slideshare.net is an interesting
outgrowth of RSS itself: you can notify various people on your
LinkedIn and other sites when you put up new content such as this
slide deck.

I still have my collection of RSS feeds somewhere on my hard drive,
and I stopped looking at them a few years ago when I realized that I
could Google just about anything that actually showed up in these
feeds.

The early blogging tools had one big thing going for them: they
automatically generated their RSS feeds without any additional
software. This made it easy to integrate their content into a wide
variety of places, and before you knew it, RSS feeds were an intrinsic
part of online software.

Indeed, it became easier to just review my Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Twitter accounts and see what people have posted there than mess with
RSS directly. So we can thank RSS first all for making the concept of
a data feed popular in these social networking sites.  Now most
everyone knows what "post to my Wall" means or "take a look at my
feed" – terms that became popular from Facebook but owe their origins
to how RSS was constructed.

Thanks to RSS, I can post my content to my Wordpress blog, and within
a few minutes (or hours, depending on how things are going out on the
Interwebs), that content will magically appear in my Twitter feed, my
Facebook profile, on LinkedIn status, and more. I have tools such as
Pixelpipe.com and TubeMogul.com that can send out content to dozens of
different places. While with many of these tools there are other
programming interfaces that are going on to enable all of this fun and
fascinating connectivity, it really got started with RSS and its
series of very minimal standards to publish and subscribe its data
feeds.

So let's start off 2010 with thanks to those early RSS pioneers!