Where does the Enterprise RSS Market go now?

“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:

• Password protected feeds 
• Feeds with very few subscribers are checked for updates very infrequently.

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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