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.