2006 Trends to Watch Part III: “RSS Inside”

One year from now, what will the state of the “feedospehere” look like? First, in order to look ahead we should look back.

In 2005 the number of Web users who said (notice emphasis) that they read RSS feeds rose, but very slowly. Forrester pegged feed readership at six percent in September, up barely from four percent of online users in 2004. One reason why feed reading has been slow to take off - and this is my speculating here - is that it's been too complicated. Or at least people think it is.

The reality is that millions of online users are already reading feeds. They're just not aware of it. This is because RSS has been seamlessly embedded into the core “foods” we consume every day as part of a healthy online diet. It's like our juice was spiked with RSS.

The credit of the RSSification of America goes to the top Web destinations. Not ironically these are the same Web sites that popularized the Internet back in the late 1990s. Yahoo is at the head of the class, followed by Google and Microsoft (this axis of do no evil is collectively known as GYM, for short).

Really Simple Syndication is central to GYM's mission to organize information. So far, these efforts are paying off. Yahoo, in fact, said that 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology. Presumably many of these are My Yahoo users.

So where do we go from here? In 2006 feed reading will become even easier than it is now, especially if there is a groundswell of adoption around Windows Vista. It will bolted into all kinds of connected devices, from cell phones to Sling Boxes to point of purchase displays. In addition all kinds of new information will find its way into feeds, not just news and blogs.

Now that we are unified under one flag, RSS - as a term - will actually begin to fade. Sure, it will always be popular among us geeks. However, RSS will increasingly become, as Greg Reinacker at Newsgator believes, plumbing. We will talk about it the same way we from time to time lovingly espouse SMTP.

To sum up, “RSS Inside” is to 2006 what “Intel Inside” was to 1996 and that's why it will be an important trend to watch next year.

Technorati Tags: 2006, Google, Greg Reinacker, Microsoft, Trends, Yahoo