Posted by Adriana Cronin-Lukas
Saturday, July 3, 2004 @ 12:00 PM
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Similarly, lack of IM interoperability has diluted the value of each IM platform. A kind of de facto platform has emerged, in which social networks and their directories become the routing infrastructure for point-to-point communications.
The winners will likely emerge from the IM components, when presence, awareness and role-based routing to devices are encapsulated in an API set.
And finally, the elephant in the room: RSS. While INBOX wrestles with the intractable problems of blurred international boundaries, too-complex authentication solutions and too-expensive computational and payment schemes, more and more of us are routing around e-mail for all but the most basic services.
IM for supply-chain communications, social networks for collaboration spaces, and RSS as the glue that ties these data points together.
This real-time services fabric is that deadliest of competitors to e-mail: It shifts attention slowly and surely away from a producer-consumer economy to a publisher-subscriber ecology. Publishers use transparency to establish credibility, then trade that authority for a reliable connection with their customers.
In this new context, the customer - not the company - controls the conversation. Or to paraphrase Anthony Lye, RSS is the property of individuals, not companies. That's why we fell in love with e-mail in the first place.
Pull, not push and all that....
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Love all this conversation about customers controlling the conversation.
Not sure I'm stating something obvious or not, though, but customers can be in control of "push" conversations, too.
Take the alerting world, where information is pushed at a customer's request. Specific info about a customer is only known by the authenticating network (i.e., MSN, AOL, or Y!), which means there is no opportunity for "accidental" abuse by companies or toolmakers.
In other words, an anonymous push situation -- the anonymity being, of course, what we all like about RSS.
Whoops... forgot to add why this is important: Push is awfully convenient, particularly for time-sensitive, mission critical, or just plain 'ole important-to-you information.
Interesting, seems that you regard RSS as push, when I believe that it is the ultimate pull - you choose whose feed you receive and read, there is no information that the feed originator can 'push' to you that you have not decided already to 'pull' from him.
No, we're in agreement that today RSS is pull.
What I'm suggesting is that there are "push" scenarios involving RSS, too. We should start hearing more & more about these.
This is important because when I can get important information pushed to me, I like that better.
(For example, the SF Giants are catching up against the Rockies. )
So the terms "push" or "pull" simply describe whether I get info conveniently delivered to me (an alert) or whether I have to do something to retrieve (visit an aggregator).
But both take a backseat to the real issue: Letting customers (fans) be anonymously in control of the info they receive. That's what I really gleamed from your entry.
In fact, I go out on a limb and say that that's really what all the RSS hubbub is about. No doubt there's a zillion reasons to like RSS, but it's the fact that we have a mass communication system that is anonymously in 100% control of the customer is what the real excitement is about (or at least to me ).
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