RSS – Views from the sideline
Over at Marketing.fm, Lee talks about a few really simple ideas for RSS. I’ve stated in the past that RSS needs to piggy back on a larger application in order to be adopted by the mainstream and I believe Google’s purchase of Feedburner will certainly help that.
RSS is a life saver for me. Well, not really a life saver, but has helped me free up time by not having to click over to a hundred websites or so each day to follow stories and news relevant to me. The issue that I have is that since my OPML is fairly large, I get quite a few updates and not all the updates are extremely relevant to me. What I’d like to see emerge is a tool that filters my feeds by either some sort of relevance (keyword density, etc) or by learning what I read and picking up similar stories (intelligent feed reading).
I haven’t used RSS for all it’s applications yet, as Lee talks about the following scenario that I would probably find useful:
Travel: Kayak.com is brilliant. You can design a customizable RSS update based on your travel criteria. For example, I have customizable updates for flight routes that I want to monitor. When tickets from New York to San Juan, PR go below $100, I will be notified (and hopefully soon be on the beach).
This scenario is brilliant. I was hunting for a television not too long ago and would have loved to setup a feed so I didn’t have to rely on checking a half dozen or so websites each day (or even going to shopzilla or other meta vertical searches).
All told, I’m excited at the future of filtered information and believe that Google can do some interesting things with Feedburner.
Just had a random thought… RSS brings me back to the days of PointCast