“R.I.P Enterprise RSS” was the headline on the ReadWriteWeb.com homepage by writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, he seems to claim that the “market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead” and that everyone is making use of Google Reader as their main RSS Reader, but this solution isn’t without its flaws as detailed in Kirkpatrick’s writeup who claims Google Reader is lacking the following enterprise features:
The enterprise RSS companies were in contention from leading Forrester researcher Oliver Young who expected ” 2008 to be a banner year for RSS and specifically enterprise RSS”, he concluded that “firms discovered the value of blogs and wikis for knowledge workers, and a healthy number of firms made initial investments.”
It was back in 2003 that Enterprise RSS really started getting some mention, although publications such asInfoWorld.com simply wanted to include RSS Feed readers in email programs, segregating the typical office conform to their “social place”, it wasn’t until 2005 that a company called Attensa arrived on the scene they allowed users to “publish information from emails and news feed articles directly to their blogs or wikis without exiting Outlook and loading their browser”, obviously what they didn’t comprehend was how everyone was going to avoid using Outlook within a year to use more web based solution like Yahoo Mail and Google Mail.
Further talk continued to emerge throughout 2003 about how PR Companies were being encouraged to start using RSS more regularly, it was believed that if PR companies release their press releases through RSS everyone could get instant access to it, the push/pull factor certainly seemed to work for some, but others simply classed it as a complimentary service to using email newsletters.
Whilst, this method of using RSS began to generate some conversation, fast forward to 2006 and still there was a lot of articles being written about how good RSS is for the enterprise and how it is a “viable communication medium”, which makes me wonder within a three year period as many internet browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer began to adopt RSS natively within their feeds did the enterprise market still need some nudging towards using RSS for things. Companies such as Newsgator and Knownow were even starting to provide solutions but only to work for enterprises “in-house” behind closed doors, and yet many enterprises are now starting in 2009 to do the complete opposite with tools such as social media sharing a lot of tidbits and information to followers that would otherwise have not been disclosed in the past, and this in theory is where I believe the problem lies for the “Death of Enterprise RSS”.
We constantly encouraged them to choose RSS back in the day, and now it’s all about Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleupon), I simply see this natural progression almost as the companies doing exactly what the market dictates, it’s not so much as many put in a way “enterprise users becoming sitting ducks”, I just think it shows we have entered the next gen of online information collection and distribution fully and that company involvement with a community will be much more complete, moreso if their news was collected internally via RSS and now they have found search.twitter.com helps them to keep more in touch with industry news it is a no brainer, and the question really needs to be how can we continue to move those “boring office drones” out of Outlook and into the current web, progressing them from reading the news to being part of the discussion groups starting at Twitter and Friendfeed.
Nevertheless, as I blogged earlier there are companies such as Microsoft who are trying to promote “people ready businesses”, using “people ready solutions” i.e Internal Wiki’s, Outlook etc etc, but if this is where the market is going with information consumption then enterprises are just going to have to adjust pretty fast otherwise they will lose out!
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joshchandler@technologygazette.com
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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