RSS on Fire

There’s an old rule in jour­nal­ism that trends can be spot­ted when you hear/see the same item hap­pen­ing three times in a row over a short period. If that’s the case, the tri­fecta yes­ter­day was:

• Yahoo! announc­ing native sup­port for RSS and ATOM in the “my yahoo” page
• Blog­lines announc­ing a new set of ser­vices to ease the load of distribution
• News­ga­tor announc­ing new part­ner­ships to drive adoption

Let’s review why those announce­ments her­ald the arrival of RSS into the mainstream.

Yahoo! and RSS

As Jeremy Zawodny said,

it does some­thing […]–some­thing that Yahoo is in a unique posi­tion to do: bring RSS to the masses.

Why is this sig­nif­i­cant? Well, quite sim­ply, while geeks like myself and read­ers of this blog know, RSS is still some­thing for early adopters. Every time a large player gets into that field, the con­cept gains a lit­tle more trac­tion. With the arrival of RSS into the Yahoo! per­sonal page, the for­mat becomes a major new deliv­ery chan­nel for con­tent cre­ators. With this, TNL.net can now fig­ures promi­nently next to Reuters feed, being given the same kind of weight.

It rep­re­sents a major shift in the way Yahoo! dis­trib­utes con­tent. In the late 1990s, the only way one could get onto that page was to strike a rela­tion­ship with Yahoo! This meant spend­ing times with both your and yahoo’s lawyers and resulted in fewer spots being avail­able on that per­sonal page (For the sake of dis­clo­sure, I was involved in one of those deals, pro­vid­ing con­tent from Internet.com on the Yahoo! pages). Look­ing at this sit­u­a­tion, Netscape devel­oped a new for­mat to push con­tent into their per­sonal page. That for­mat was the gen­e­sis for what we now know as RSS. So Yahoo! has now taken a strat­egy that was ini­tially devel­oped by Netscape as a way to com­pete with Yahoo! Oh, the irony!

With Yahoo! mak­ing this move, one can only won­der as to when other por­tal play­ers will do. Will they fol­low suit? Will AOL soon sup­port RSS? What about MSN? If that’s the case, this would be a seis­mic change in the level of sup­port for RSS and would get most major com­pa­nies to start think­ing about dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent over this channel.

Blog­lines, News­ga­tor and distribution

More geeky but also of high sig­nif­i­cance are the announce­ments that Blog­lines is offer­ing web ser­vices which can be inte­grated in a num­ber of other news­read­ers, and a sim­i­lar announce­ment from News­ga­tor. A few weeks ago, I wrote about capac­ity plan­ning and RSS. This is a major issue in the world of syn­di­ca­tion these days and Blog­lines is the first ser­vice to attempt to offer an open solu­tion. Sim­i­larly, Newsgator’s announce­ment rep­re­sents the fact that such approach is some­thing that more peo­ple are think­ing of, not just the works of a sin­gle com­pany. The rea­son these tech­ni­cal announce­ments are par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant is that they rep­re­sent a poten­tial shift in terms of how peo­ple think of RSS.

The dis­tri­b­u­tion to a super POP for RSS can rep­re­sent a step in the right direc­tion in terms of dis­trib­ut­ing syn­di­ca­tion feeds. One could envi­sion feeds being dis­trib­uted to enti­ties like Blog­lines as a way to alle­vi­ate and redis­trib­ute traf­fic. With more and more mes­sag­ing mov­ing over RSS, this could be an inter­est­ing approach in terms of mak­ing RSS scale.

The fact that News­ga­tor also takes that approach shows that this is some­thing that is gain­ing sup­port. I do see the Blog­lines effort as hav­ing more of an impact, how­ever, because it is an open one, whereas News­ga­tor is cre­at­ing more of a walled gar­den by part­ner­ing strate­gi­cally instead of offer­ing hooks into the ser­vice to any­one who wants to use it.

What we are see­ing here is the emer­gence of a new kind of con­tent aggre­ga­tors and dis­trib­u­tors. They are the new pipeline, the new glue for what could become a new way to dis­trib­ute con­tent. And I don’t just mean the kind of light text-based con­tent which cur­rently makes up the bulk of syn­di­ca­tion feeds. What I can envi­sion is these kind of efforts becom­ing sim­i­lar to bit­tor­rent, offer­ing audio, video, and other types of rich con­tent in a dis­trib­uted fash­ion. At the end of the day, they could become poten­tial com­peti­tors with Aka­mai, as they push more con­tent closer to the edge with­out over­load­ing the servers offer­ing that con­tent. They can poten­tially become the new prox­ies of syndication.

How­ever, this can also become a point of con­cern. As more and more peo­ple rely on such points of pres­ence, they have to cre­ated a trusted rela­tion­ships with the providers. What hap­pens if the ser­vice goes down? What if they decide that a feed shouldn’t be redis­trib­uted ? What hap­pens if they decided to add adver­tis­ing to every item in a feed? (I’m not say­ing that they would think in such a way but try­ing to high­light a poten­tial sce­nario)? What would hap­pen if a legal entity asked them to stop dis­trib­ut­ing a feed? There are a num­ber of inter­est­ing issues aris­ing out of the con­cept of redis­tri­b­u­tion. While in the past, Blog­lines could only affect blog­line read­ers (and News­ga­tor could only affect News­ga­tor users), they now sit at a major inter­sec­tion where they become a crit­i­cal part of the architecture.

This rep­re­sents issues but also oppor­tu­ni­ties. While they do aggre­gate con­tent, alle­vi­at­ing load from the server of con­tent cre­ators, they also sit at a point where they can get more infor­ma­tion about read­ers. For exam­ple, a sim­ple ques­tion thrown on one of those ser­vices could allow to cre­ate bet­ter demo­graphic pro­files of syn­di­cated feed users. One could see them aggre­gate that data and start reselling it to con­tent cre­ators who are inter­ested in know­ing more about theirs read­ers. In the future, one could also start rely­ing on those net­works as a way to tar­get read­ers (for exam­ple, tar­get par­tic­u­lar entries to par­tic­u­lar types). And finally, those net­works could finally offer the holy grail of syn­di­ca­tion: mon­e­ti­za­tion. Since they would be sit­ting in a space where they can con­trol a walled gar­den, they could start offer­ing “pre­mium” ser­vices, sub­scrip­tion to feeds (or bas­kets of feeds) for a price, going into a rev­enue shar­ing model with the con­tent creators.