This is the year of RSS breakthrough. Look at the dozens of aggregators currently popping up: .Net aggregators, Outlook aggregators, Mac OS aggregators, you name it. There’s going to be a Big Co aggregator by the end of the week from Apple (as part of the overpriced .Mac), Microsoft (please don’t limit it to Outlook Express) or, supreme irony, Netscape if AOL thinks it’s one of the ways to make a comeback (ok, that’s the most unlikely of the three.) Yahoo should do this within MyYahoo, but I suspect they can’t figure out how to match that flexibility and openness to their business model, which is precisely their problem.
OK, then Google is going to do something about it, and again, their competitors will wonder: how come these guys eat our lunch so easily? Who knows, Google’s current hiring of Windows developers might be related to an RSS client. Look at the current aggregators, they’re not even really trying to address search needs, they’re all stuck in "subscribe and browse" mode. The desktop client (or browser add-on) would plug into a dedicated rss.google.com. Mike Krus, go pitch ’em!
This flurry of activity in the software world is matched by increasing availability of RSS content. There are new channels every day. Not just weblogs or screen-scraped officious feeds. I just subscribed to K-v-R Audio Plugin Resources News, for the (still very newbie) audio geek in me.
02/25/03 update: Why Did Google Want Blogger?. Are all Blogger accounts (including the vast, free majority) going to have their RSS feeds for Google aggregation purposes?
