Though most users still don't have any idea what RSS means, underneath the covers RSS is taking hold within many applications they use. My.yahoo is now RSS-based and the new IE7 and Windows Vista will leverage RSS as the primary means of pushing content to users.
Whether or not the term RSS gains prominence, its ubiquity is not really in question. RSS is the protocol that will be used more and more for distribution of information inside the enterprise and among publishers and their users.
One company seems well-positioned to reap the benefits of widespread RSS adoption. While there are many web and software-based clients for RSS, most of them are geared to the individual desktop. The one company which is focusing its efforts on RSS for the enterprise is Newsgator.
Newsgator has an RSS Platform and suite of products geared to three audiences:
1. End-users: products like FeedDemon, a software-based reader, NetNewsWire, a Mac-based client, and Newsgator Inbox, which lets you use Microsoft Outlook as your RSS client.
2. Enterprise customers, with the NewsGator Enterprise Server.
3. Private label clients seeking to use RSS to distribute content to customers.
While RSS readers are becoming a commodity, Newsgator offers the advantage that all of its readers - for the Web, the desktop and mobile devices - are integrated, so if you've read something on one device, it will be marked as read in another.
Newsgator Enterprise Server is an infrastructure product geared towards helping the enterprise manage vast numbers of feeds coming in from the outside and being distributed within an organization. Part of the value proposition is simply helping organizations manage bandwidth, to avoid the types of problems that early push applications like PointCast created. If you have 1,000 users who subscribe to a specific Wall Street Journal feed, for example, you can bring that feed in once to the server, rather than having a thousand users pulling it directly to their desktops. As companies continue to move away from installed desktop applications, a server-based model works well.
The Enterprise Server can also be used to centrally manage blacklists and whitelists, to manage access credentials, to block undesirable URLs and to restrict access outside the firewall. Version 1.3 of the Newsgator server, just released, adds new features such as "clippings", the ability to drop articles into a folder which users may subscribe to, the ability to forward any email to an RSS feed, "smart feeds" (persistent keyword searches) and more.
The early adopters of Newsgator Enterprise have come from a number of industries. Early adopter firms like Edelman Public Relations and executive search firm Spencer Stuart have been among the first on board. According to Newsgator Director of Product Marketing Todd Berkowitz, they are seeing strong interest from pharmaceutical companies, law firms and others. Applications include use of external content for sales, marketing and competitive intelligence, as well as internal efforts from corporation communications, human resources and product development.
Newsgator has also signed up some impressive clients for its private label services. The A beta version of My USAToday, driven by Newsgator allows users to construct a home page combining content from USAToday and external sources. Similarly, My Newsweek is a syndicated service hosted by Newsgator, featuring feeds by columnists as well as feeds for hot topics and latest buzz.
What's coming next for Newsgator? According to Berkowitz, some of the items on the development roadmap include support for tagging, improved filtering and relevance and integration with other desktop clients.
What's the impact for publishers?
As I've posted previously, it's pretty clear that RSS is coming and coming fast. It may get a cooler name (Microsoft and Feedburner seem to have adopted the term WebFeed), but that little orange logo will be driving virtually all applications that push content. If you haven't begun to establish an XML strategy, it's time to start now. While content providers with strong technology resources may wish to develop their own solutions, those who prefer to outsource may want to look at private label solutions from companies like Newsgator.
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