R.I.P. Enterprise RSS | Hacker News Reader

R.I.P. Enterprise RSS

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14 pointsqhoxie8 comments

The author doesn't really make the case for this. What the hell is a 'solid RSS strategy' for enterprises? What features make a reader 'business class'? How does not using RSS make you a 'sitting duck', and if so, why is no one using it? Why petulantly insult people who read RSS in their email program?

a solid RSS strategy is subscribing to key news sources in your field, your competitors' blogs and search results, keyword searches, thought leaders and in the enterprise, internal company announcements, requests for assistance, financial, inventory or other information.

features that make an reader business class = support for authenticated (pw protected) feeds, a good mobile version, local/offline caching, displaying diffs when items in feed have been changed, administrative control over dynamic OPML files, etc.

sitting duck: not using an RSS reader well leaves means it is going to take you more time to absorb less information regarding your industry. RSS automates immediate delivery of targeted information.

why petulantly insult email RSS readers? because I am a snob.

- the author.

That's some good detail, thanks. Why do you think it hasn't taken off in large organizations? Have you talked with anyone at those companies?

My own suspicion: Is the slow, enterprise sales pitch cycle really compatible with the idea of nimble, pull-based information gathering?

I bet is that people simply don't know about it. Even with developers I am still introducing them the usefulness of rss. And it doesn't see any higher with the general population.

I think that for the average enterprise user, sticking RSS feeds into their lifeblood (read: Outlook/Email) makes the most amount of sense. Most executives / desk jockeys spend a lot of their time there, and I would suspect an equal sort of treatment is applied to their email as it is to RSS feeds.

As a point of opinion, I would posit that lack of integration into other common office applications is a barrier to entry to applications soliciting the enterprise space.

Additionally, why are email programs not capable of being good RSS feeds, and how is RSS so different from email that the concepts don't apply?

I'm one of the Google Reader crowd. I have a second client (thunderbird) that I use solely for checking internal feeds. Admittedly the Google Reader UI isn't as great as a good desktop client, but it does offer one killer feature, seamless "syncing" between all of the different machines I use on a daily basis.

I don't use RSS either, except maybe for the originalsignal tech & world sections. http://tech.originalsignal.com/

I just took google reader for a 5 minute spin & it didn't seem nearly as polished. What else is out there?

An "Enterprise RSS Strategy"? Is that like an "Enterprise HTML Strategy"?

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