[linuxydave]

"In addition to straight RSS reading it had some kind of controls for making groups of people. An admin could say, for instance, that all developers are subscribed to these ten feeds, plus whatever else they might want."

I had a similar idea a few years ago but didn't think there was a market for it. RSS feeds don't use up a lot of bandwidth so you couldn't use that angle (even in a country like South Africa, where I lived at the time, where bandwidth was limited and expensive). I also couldn't picture a company wanting to spend money on something as non-critical as RSS feeds. I wonder how wrong I was?

[breischl]

I don't think there's ever been much market for RSS as such, because RSS is just a means to an end. Companies, particularly big ones, are constantly trying to improve internal communications. Think HR newsletters, IT updates (we're upgrading to Windows XP! [hey, they're enterprises]), the CEO's newsletter, version 27 of internal tool Foo is being released and what it means to you, whatever. They want better internal communications and it looked like RSS could help, so they bought it.

NewsGator (now Sitrion) still does this with Social Sites, they just do it as a Facebook-ish newsfeed rather than as an RSS reader. Same goal, different implementation.