Companies are starting to go crazy over RSS, and probably for the wrong reason. Yeah, it’s nice that it delivers news from lots of different sites to your web or email browser. Yeah, maybe we’ll be able to have some nice abilities to search this news.

I say, “So what! Who cares! Is the search really going to be that good? Do we really need to search the several feeds that we receive that much? Can’t I just browse them quickly? Isn’t Google News enough if I need to search?”

There are some really good things coming in RSS as soon as people start getting over the idea that RSS is only for news. RSS is a nice standard way to deliver XML. Well, maybe not so standard, since there are a couple of RSS standards floating around the Internet, but I digress. As soon as people start realizing that you can send “anything” via RSS in such a way that various programs (e.g. browsers) can be written to use that “standard” format, then we will be getting somewhere.

A friend of mine brought up an incredibly inventive and very useful implementation of RSS the other day. (I would tell you what it is, but I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet). Being an experienced programmer, ideas like his don’t usually catch me out of the blue, but this one was so innovative, that I just had to sit and wonder why I hadn’t thought of it before.

Let’s not get stuck in a rut thinking that RSS is just really simple syndication.

Good things are coming with RSS. Let’s be ingenious enough to start thinking of and implementing them.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Development Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.