Craig Barnes, CEO of Attensa, shares about how RSS finds its way into business. The most used web application that integrates RSS is probably blogs. What’s next?

Based on his experience at Attensa, he observed that RSS sesms to make its way into business organically as follows:

1. Blog post updates, mainstream news - An individual starts using RSS to get updates from her favorite blogs. After a while, mainstream news such as BusinessWeek and other industry publication begin to adopt this technology. More integration to common applications such as web browser makes it easier.
2. Marketing and competitive intelligence - Users now have the option to subscribe to Google News search result through RSS. Google Alerts, which delivers via email, clutters email inboxes.
3. Business blogs, Wikis and collaboration software - Business blogs, Wikis and collaboration software such as BaseCamp offer support for RSS to syndicate updates to those who are interested to the feeds.
4. Enterprise applications that utilize RSS - Enterprise application vendors begin to enable their applications with RSS. Spanning Salesfoce is an example of such application.

RSS overcomes information overload by giving end-users the ability to manage information more effectively. According to Barnes, RSS will mirror the success and the negativity that email has brought to us in business. RSS will bring to all (and already is for some) unprecedented business productivity.

I would say that most small businesses and solopreneurs are in stage 2 or 3. Having enterprise level applications may not be feasible very soon, but it should give us something interesting to watch.

Source: Craig’s Lemonade.