My thoughts on RSS use cases
Brad Feld announced that Boulder Software Club is planning an event to discuss usage of RSS, first of all in enterprise.
For a long time, I actually wanted to write my thoughts about RSS and its place in technology landscape, so Brad's post gave me a reason to finally overcome my laziness (heh). I'll start by my take on some topics that will be discussed there.
Why RSS instead of e-mail – isn’t it just the same thing? Isn’t this just for bloggers?
No, RSS is not the same as e-mail, though similar. RSS is better suited for some use cases, not only for technical but for psychological reasons too. If I wear reader's hat, I strongly prefer RSS over a a mailing list, because if I loose or cancel my mail account for some reason, I need to reroute all my subscriptions which is tedious and error-prone, whereas with RSS, I just need to carry my OPML around. Subscribing to and unsubscribing from mailing lists is more evolved than same actions with RSS feeds and usually requires two-step process. Second big advantage is that I get precisely what I subscribed to in my blogroll, and mailboxes tend to become spam targets. As an author I may prefer RSS to mailing list because my (potential) readers prefer RSS to e-mail (see above).
RSS is not just for bloggers, it may be used in all areas that needs some kind of periodic update protocol. Software packages may use RSS to get information about available updates. Microsoft is going to use RSS for synchronization.
What are typical use-cases of RSS applied to the enterprise ...
Take for example a typical situation in corporate environment: you need to propagate some kind of a knowledge but you are just not sure about target audience. For example, you are a software developer and finished some important feature. Now you may need to send a notice to your immediate manager, that's a no-brainer, but then things start to get complicated. Documentation needs to be updated but you just do not know who in documentation team is now responsible for that area, so you send e-mail to Documentation Team leader or to the whole documentation team. Now, QA manager needs to know about feature too to test it, check. But oops, you forgot sales engineers, some of them will be caught with 'deer in the lights' look when curious customers ask them about that new feature. Your immediate manager and QA manager consider this feature (and good tests' results) as an important milestone so your e-mail gets forwarded to VP of engineering. Twice. VP of engineering wonders if VP of marketing may need to know about that feature, and whether it will help in lead generation, so she forwards it just in case...
As an employee of medium or large corporation you often faced with a dilemma: you do no want to send e-mails to too many people - some of them may not be that interested and you appreciate their attention span, so you do not send your e-mail to too many addresses. On the other hand, you may not know that some of your colleagues need exactly that information, right now, so you do not want to miss some important addressees. RSS transfers this burden to the shoulder of your readers and they are usually in better position to know what kind of information they need.
If you are a manager you may choose a subscription style that fits your management style. Control freaks may subscribe to every single feed and keep tabs on everything, and fans of delegation may read only blogs of their key subordinates and higher management, hoping that if anything interesting pops up, it will be reblogged by one of the bloggers they read (analog of e-mail forwarding in the RSS world).
RSS is also beneficial if you want employees to roll out ideas more freely and often. The thing is, people generally do not want to send non-critical e-mails to others, because they believe they may be annoying, but will happily blog them. It's like instead of approaching you bosses with your idea one-by-one you speak about it at company lunch and all who listen to you, know about it (What's that sound? It's an analogy police knocking on my door).
Posted in Personal Technology | Software frolov's blog | 2 comments
Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-02-15 23:37.
