RSS Gaining Momentum
February 2004

It is often difficult to predict which technologies will catch on, so we tend to track many of them. One technology that we pointed out to readers last year now appears to be gaining momentum: RSS, an XML-based format for delivering content. RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” depending on your preference. RSS lets readers sign up and receive headlines and stories from web sites, weblogs, and online newsletters. To do so, users must download and install a piece of “aggregator” software on their desktops. There are many such aggregators with names like AmphetaDesk, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator. When users click on a headline, they are linked to the originating web site to read the full story.

RSS is quickly gathering steam with a growing number of large and small publishers and web sites, including BBC, Rolling Stone, Sci-Fi Today, Slashdot, Forrester Research, and LiveDaily.com, a music- and concert-news site operating under Ticketmaster's online division. RSS can support free as well as paid content, and some publishers have started inserting text advertising into their RSS-delivered headlines. RSS caught on early with newspaper websites. In recent months, RSS feeds have been added by The Telegraph of London, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, some of whom offer as many as 30 different topical feeds. RSS is now attracting a wider group of content players. For example, Accelerize New Media, a software company, has launched a subscription-based service for getting alerts on SEC filings via an RSS feed. The most significant new entrant is Yahoo, which enables My Yahoo users to receive headlines from RSS feeds from thousands of other web sites of their own choosing.

RSS is one way around the current problem with spam invading email as a news delivery channel. RSS operates in a closed connection with publishers and users don't furnish their email addresses, so there is no opportunity for spam or viruses to infiltrate, nor any chance of delivery being blocked by anti-spam software. A resulting benefit is that publishers no longer need to maintain email lists because the user pulls content from sites of interest, rather than having email pushed to them. As we predicted last year, one disadvantage of early RSS technology is gradually being remedied. While RSS aggregator software is separate from browsers and email clients and users must still download and install it separately, there are now versions of RSS that integrate into browsers and POP mail clients. In addition, at least one vendor, NewsGator, offers a reader that will work on mobile devices that support HTML. Yahoo’s offering removes the need for separate aggregator software altogether by using Yahoo itself as the aggregator and giving users an RSS window within My Yahoo.