We feel for RSS, the technology of the Decade Unappreciated

In the ten years since Real Simple Syndication (RSS) was invented, was one of the most significant technologies that Rodney Dangerfield would say "got no respect." Provide the connective glue behind most social media, linking various Web sites for automatic publication of content, be able to Webify various other protocols - RSS is a technology that most of us now take for granted.

I'm not a big fan of the best kinds of stories of the decade (in particular as the decade is not really over yet for another year). But while I was thinking about what we have done over the last ten years, I decided to dedicate a moment of appreciation for RSS and everything he did. And 'one of those stories of unintended consequences. And what is ironic is how many of us use every day without realizing it or knowing what to do to help better our lives online.

Back at the end of 1999, some computer scientists to Netscape few (about undervalued companies, at least for those of us who were not part of their stratospheric IPO), Apple and Microsoft put together the beginnings of the protocol. Aided and abetted by expert and programmer Dave Winer, RSS began to show in a variety of odd places, including the first Web server software. The early days of RSS generated a series of specialized software tools called RSS readers that have allowed some of us to keep track of new content that was added to our favorite websites without having to scroll one by one in our browser. And that's where things stood for most of the time, until the blogosphere and the social Web took off.

Well, those RSS readers were probably the biggest pile of mostly unused software. A few geeks used them, but most were oddities. I remember a presentation in 2007 at the New Communications Forum to explain RSS to public relations people, and some of the things I mentioned then still apply technology as a way to capture information quickly, the first on your block to cubicle find something, e-mail supplement as a way of sending information to a lot of people quickly.

I still have my collection of RSS feeds somewhere on my hard drive, and I stopped watching them a few years ago when I realized that I could Google anything that really showed in these feeds.

The early blogging tools had a big thing going for them: they generate RSS feeds automatically, without any additional software. This made it easy to integrate their content into a wide variety of places, and before you know it, RSS feeds are an intrinsic part of the online software.

Indeed, it became easier just to review my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and see what people have posted there that mess with RSS directly. So we can thank first all RSS feed to make the concept of data in these popular social networking sites. Now most everyone knows what "post to my Wall" means or "look at my feed" - terms that became popular from Facebook, but owe their origins to how RSS was constructed.

Thanks to RSS, I can send my content on my Wordpress blog, and in a few minutes (or hours, depending on how things go on the interwebs), that content will magically appear in my Twitter feed, my Facebook profile , the status on LinkedIn, and more. I like tools and Pixelpipe.com TubeMogul.com that can send content to dozens of different places. While many of these tools there are other programming interfaces that are going to allow connectivity to all of this fun and fascinating, really started with RSS and its very minimum set of standards to publish and subscribe to its data feed.

So let's start 2010 with thanks to those early pioneers RSS! ......