Feeds are under-hyped

Despite the considerable amount of attention that RSS feeds have received lately, I continue to believe RSS is UNDER-hyped. This is not to say that feeds will cure cancer, or even that RSS will be the feed standard that will be around in a decade, but feeds represents the first new form of digital publishing since the web itself, and is really only the third significant way to publish on the Internet, after HTML and email. Email is great for correspondance. Traditional web pages are great for static content. Feeds are better than both for dynamic content--streams of information, be it news or blogs or inventories or what have you--and that's big.

To date the hype has been about RSS clients, and some web-based solutions, but the hype ought to be about the whole concept of a very new form of information delivery and the broader changes that will result. Note that we will actually READ feeds in a variety of different ways, including via web pages, email clients, and specific feed clients, but just because feeds will be published and viewed via the web and email, doesn't mean it is not something qualitatively new.

We all remember our first email experience, and our first web experience, and our first IM experience. We will all remember our first feed experience, too.

The Boston Globe is catching onto this, as evidenced by this piece: Enthusiasts call Web feed next big thing. Excerpt:

E-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.

And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.

Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.

The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories or bits of commentary available for the plucking.