Is Enterprise RSS dead? What is RSS, anyway?
Here is another comment on another ongoing discussion in the blogosphere, this time around RW/W’s Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “controversial” article about the death of Enterprise RSS market. Neville Hobson got involved as well and more will probably follow soon.
Marshall is arguing, that the enterprise market for RSS is dead and most of the companies which have been offering RSS readers seem to be failing and not making money. But what is the ‘Enterprise RSS market’? Market of RSS readers or market of feed readers? The first one may be dead, while the latter one is on the verge of success. But let’s start from the bottom…
I think there is a bit of misunderstanding of what RSS really is. Let’s admit it - RSS is a protocol. It’s nothing more, than just an XML dialect, used for expressing streams of updates of some (web) resource. These streams are called feeds. Read more on wikipedia if you don’t believe me. RSS is a protocol, enabling the web-based, asynchronous communication based on the subscription model - if you for example find this blog interesting, you can subscribe to its feed .
Since the beginning, several companies have been trying to make money on feeds and all those various feed reader makers (like the ones Marshall is mentioning in his article) are among them. Yes, some of these companies may be dead, but IMHO for a reason which is completely different to the ones currently discussed. The reason for their failuer is competition in the form of various social networking sites.
The thing is, that it’s not about the RSS as such (or Atom for that matter), which IMO REALLY is too technical term. RSS/Atom are just protocols enabling people to communicate in an asynchronous way. It’s more about the utilization of feeds and subscription model - and these do not seem to be dead to me! Just look on facebook or twitter. They are all about the asynchronous communication. They are all about following (subscribing to) each other’s feeds! By making friends with someone on facebook, you subscribe to his/her updates and once you do that., you will start receiving them into your News Feed on your homepage and you don’t care about the protocol behind the curtain.
Simply put - feeds and asynchronous communication got much better productized through social networking sites than through the feed urls presented as those 
silly icons. Most of today users of social networks don’t care about RSS, but they do care about News Feeds in their social networks. The same is IMO valid for the enterprises which seem to be adopting social networking technonologies much better, than the original, old-fashioned RSS-based ‘copy-this url-into-your-feed-reader’ model.