My old colleague Steve Gillmor apparently got a lot of grief about his RSS obsession, thanks to a posting by the Scobleizer (there's a reason he's got that knickname, after all). Without context, Steve's RSS boosterism may seem to border on the bizarre to some. But it's easy to understand once you put all the other pieces together.
For those of you who haven't been fully indoctrinated yet, RSS (which, depending on which faction of the XML wars you belong to, stands for Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is an XML format most commonly used to “syndicate” content (usually web content, as in news “feeds” or weblog entries)–as part of a paid or free subscription to a specific content source. RSS “feeds” are pulled in by a piece of software and rendered for a user to read directly (as with RSS newsreaders like AmphetaDesk and Ranchero's NetNewsWire, and blogging software like Radio), or processed to be posted to a web page.
At least, that's what they're used for now. Because of the way they work, RSS feeds could concievably be the delivery vehicle for any number of things. Radio already uses them to deliver media downloads–subscribe to, for instance, Adam Curry's weblog feed, and you'll get an occasional video “enclosure” download to your hard drive.
In fact, RSS is potentially a great way to deliver web services to user's desktops as well. What if they were used as the subscription vehicle for web services–to, say, syndicate an interface to a movie schedule database, or a context-sensitive connection to an online bookseller?
There's already a similar implementation of a “channel” based content delivery system that's widely distributed: Sherlock in Mac OS X 10.2 uses “channels” to deliver web services to the desktop. Sherlock uses an Apple-specific API for its web services that governs how they're presented on the client–but what if that information were just provided in the description tag for an RSS feed item, and the link was to the backend web service instead of Jow Blow's latest weblog entry?
There are already some web services being delivered as RSS. An early example of this is Google Alert (which uses the Google Web APIs to generate an RSS feed of a specific Google search, updating it daily); Radio allows users to do something similar with its “Googlebox” code.
Amazon already has an “associate” program that uses links from other people's websites–but what if it delivered a web service-based front end, through an RSS feed?
Or, what if Microsoft issued all of its security patches via an RSS feed that was consumed by the OS itself at start-up?
Sean M. Gallagher 