RSS Roadmap?

Courtesy of my friends at The Weekly Read comes a link to this lenghty post by Bill Burnham on RSS and the issues it faces. Lot's of good thoughts in here.

Comments

[Matt Blumberg]

Bill does make lots of good points, and RSS is something to keep an eye on across the online world. It's clearly different from PointCast, which I always thought was a "solution looking for a problem." One thing I have been wondering about is whether or not RSS will ever be a meaningful medium for marketers (it feels very publisher-oriented), as marketers try to figure out how to break out from the flood of spam. I think the jury's still out on that...although now that I think about it, had Pointcast lived, it may well have turned into a decent channel for targeted, permission marketing as well as content.

[Druce Vertes]

The Techbargains.com feed of hot deals is a good marketing application of RSS.

Certainly a more elegant technology solution than the Orbitz agent that runs in the background and clutters your toolbar. Also better than an email which isn't updated everytime you open it.

All those marketing emails, at least any worth reading, are good candidates for RSS. mySimon-type price engines can adopt RSS so you can subscribe to deals for the latest Canon.

You can view RSS as push, or just as enabling a better browsing experience for info that updates in real-time, with structure.

The biggest difference vs. push is that RSS is a demand-pull phenomenon, not one where someone's looking to own desktop real estate and eyeballs.

It's reached the tipping point, and people will evolve it to overcome its problems, and integrate it into mainstream Web/email clients/servers. Some feeds may be fads, but RSS isn't push 2.0 - it or something much like it is here to stay.