The fridge that doesn't want to explode

So last night I took myself down to the fourth Beers and Innovation: RSS frontiers, at a buzzingly full but by no means crowded Pitcher and Piano in Soho. Interesting format - Michael Nutley of NMA moderated a panel of three RSS entrepreneurs, the founders of variously MyZebra, WebKitchen and Snipperoo. They each talked for a while about the future of RSS and the place for their particular vision in that future, ranging over RSS-powered widgets to open protocols for microchunking content. Sam of TechCrunch UK rubbished the RSS format in favour of Atom and was duly rebutted; everyone agreed that they didn't know how widely RSS is actually used (it's 12%, says Jupiter, or 6%, says Forrester, though it struck me as extraordinary that the three panellists had built business plans on a technology they didn't know for sure anyone used); and, prompted by Ian Forrester of the BBC, we touched collectively on the problems of measuring RSS feeds for advertisers.

My favourite question of the evening though concerned weird and wonderful applications of RSS, which prompted Ivan Pope to propose an RSS feed that would let fridge owners know if their fridge was about to explode. Universal agreement that we would like to be informed if our fridge was about to explode ensued. My own proposal for a weird and wonderful application for RSS remains an alarm clock that talks to a mash-up of transport feeds from various sites and wakes you up at a time determined by the prevailing traffic conditions. Still haven't seen one out there...

My only criticism of the event would be that keeping to the panel format somewhat wasted the collective knowledge assembled in the room: every few minutes someone would ask a question from the floor, and the three panellists would have a stab at answering the question, and then another question would be raised. This format produced some very interesting answers, but I got the feeling that a more free-ranging debate amongst the whole audience might have produced even greater insights - it seemed likely that many of the audience members would have been better placed to answer a number of the questions than the guys who happened to have opened the conversation. Still, this is a minor quibble indeed; there were some useful insights, and I've already booked a place for the next one.

Comments

[James C]

nice summary - i agree the panel format can go on a bit sometimes but you do get a chance to chat afterwards i guess.

[Sam Sethi]

I'm not sure I agree with the term "rebutted". I think Ivan agreed he would choose the Atom format over RSS but didn't know why.

As I sure you are aware RSS 2.0 is not the same as RSS 0.92 The RSS 2.0 format was hijacked by Dave Winer and has no RDF or semantic structure it. So as the room started to discuss measurement and feedback of RSS, I wonder how you think RSS 2.0 will achieve this?

RSS 2.0 has been brilliant and changed the way we all share information but it is slowly reaching the end of its shelf life. This is why we are seeing new iterations like mRSS (audio/video) and SSE (bi-directional) to extend the value of RSS.

What I was trying to say was the Atom 1.0 publishing protocol may help move the RSS usefulness forward and that was why I think RSS 2.0 (the format in common use today) is dead.

I was also trying to spark a debate by being slightly controversial. Sadly that point may have gone over the heads of some people ;-)

[Ivan Pope]

I agree that a more freewheeling discussion would have been welcome. And I'd just like to point out that my business plan is in no way founded on RSS - it's just that RSS is one interesting way to deliver content to widgets! Thanks for the feedback - I really enjoyed it and the discussions afterwards.

[Seamus McCauley]

Sam - fair point, "rebutted" is too loaded a word to be helpful here (though it seems to have done its job in sparking a debate by being slightly controversial...). What I might more fairly say is that I rather thought you were deliberately setting up a straw man to knock down, and it was duly knocked down.

RSS2.0 is of course weak in terms of metadata and feedback, and Atom better. This isn't really a problem with the RSS format per se though, just a limitation of the "current" version. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the RSS/Atom debate is a straw man because the technology won't become mainstream until it's functionally invisible to the users, at which point we (the publishers, in the widest sense) will have worked around this formatting issue.

Ivan - didn't appreciate from your comments at the forum that your business isn't RSS focused, I'll take another look.