|
I don't know how well it would have worked for Google (or not), but, personally, I am very, very "+1" on RSS feeds in social network streams as a general concept. No, you don't get the exact same experience that you get with a "conventional" RSS feed reader, but when your news stream can have arbitrary RSS/Atom delivered content, it opens up a lot of options. This is why I was so happy that we just got RSS feed subscriptions incorporated into Quoddy[1] - our enterprise social network product. So many things that you might be interested in can be syndicated via RSS / Atom - new documents posted to a document management system, new customer records posted to a CRM system, etc. Personally I'm more excited about this feature than almost anything we've done lately. What will be interesting, will be exploring how to utilize UI elements to give a user the ability to get the "best of both worlds" and view their content in a fashion akin to the way Google Reader (or other readers) work, OR view it "in stream" ala a G+ or Facebook style news stream. When you take a step back and look at it, in many ways, a "wall" or "stream" isn't that different than an "inbox", and one wonders if you can't find a neat way to collapse all of this "stuff" (email, rss feeds, social "status updates", etc.) into one interface. Anyway, call me bullish on syndication, but I almost feel like we need a song titled You Can't Stop RSS set to the tune of Twisted Sister's You Can't Stop Rock and Roll.[2] [1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/tree/prhodes [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaehBH7DtR4 |