Ken Yarmosh has an excellent post today about bringing Web 2.0 technologies to the mainstream. It’s true. RSS may seem world changing, but it won’t be as long as only 11% of users know what it is.
So what will it take to take technologies like RSS mainstream? Well, they need a killer app, for one thing. And blogs aren’t it. Sorry.
A killer app must solve a specific, major problem in a way that affects most people in the market. It must be so compelling that everyone will want it, even if it is new and “risky”.
The problem with blogs is that they solve a problem the majority of users never knew they had. Sure, for a select few, the global conversation enabled by RSS and blogs is life changing. But, as Shel Israel points out, the blogger lifestyle isn’t for everyone. In fact, for most people, spending their days trying to stay on top of a global conversation is not appealing at all.
So, back to the drawing board. What could take RSS mainstream? How about Business Management?
Think about this: every company thrives on the flow of information. Most of us spend the first hour or two of our day checking website, reading email reports, and hanging around the water cooler to catch up on all the important information flowing through our business.
This not only takes a lot of time, but its very inefficient. Informal communication networks and fixed reporting systems are unreliable. When an important event happens in a business, the news may or may not get to the right person. It all depends on who’s at work they day, their priorities, and so on.
Now enter RSS. Imagine if every software system in your business published an RSS feed. Imagine if every important project in your company had its own blog. Imagine hundreds of feeds running through your business that you can subscribe to selectively. Imagine having immediate, reliable notification of important events going all the way up the management chain as soon as they occur. Now that’s life changing!
This kind of information flow is possible even today. I’m the CEO of a small team. We have 12 people spread all over the world working on different parts of the business literally 24 hours a day. Thanks to the 43 Sprout-related feeds I have in my newsreader, I know almost immediately when something important happens anywhere at anytime. And no one has to stop what they are doing to come and tell me.
It feels great to know what is going on in the business. What’s even better though, is that when a problem comes up that I need to deal with, I’m generally already well informed. It isn’t just me either. Our whole team works like this, which means that we can make better decisions, faster, and with less effort than we could without our feed readers.
As RSS feeds begin to appear in more and more business software and as more and more businesses learn the power of “Management by Feed”, eventually this is going to reach a tipping point. And that is when you will finally start to see RSS both understood and adopted by the masses.
Mainstream is just around the corner for Web 2.0 technologies. We just need to find the right killer apps.
UPDATE: Peter and I talked about this quite a bit more after I first posted this. We are going to write some more posts in the coming days outlining some of the ways Management by Feed has helped Sproutit.
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Sproutit builds web apps for small business. Our new service Mailroom can do wonders for your sales and support email. (And yes, it has RSS feeds.)
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