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Gartner conclusion on RSS - wrong.

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According to Gartner's report, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, RSS will be useful for content that is 'nice to know' rather than 'need to know' (via Silicon Republic).

The report is described as an IT buzzword hype scorecard which assesses the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44
technologies and trends over the coming decade, including
Location-aware applications, RFID, SOA, Web Services Enabled Business
Models (new one on me, but nice buzzword - maybe 'API business'?),
Wikis, Podcasting and P2P.

Quick rant (I confess: I've not read the report yet, so am going by the press release and soundbyte):

I think Gartner's RSS conclusion is dead wrong, as their conclusion - that RSS will be not be useful for critical content - can only
be arrived at if one makes a significant and wrong assumption about RSS to begin with.

The wrong assumption is that RSS must be the end-to-end (or at the
very end of) the content delivery format/process of business-critical
content/information - and the implication is that a feed
aggregator/reader/viewer/client is the end-destination for x-critical content. This implication therefore pits RSS against
email or other tried and tested messaging/transport technologies.
They fail to recognize the simple fact that
RSS content can be transported (reliably and pinged as often a
necessary - this is a software issue not an RSS issue!), consumed and
transformed by
anything for anything: from RSS xml TO an email message, from RSS xml
TO sms alerts, and visa versa. Major oversight, me thinks.

/rant.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2005
    Indeed, I wrote just such an app for my company.

    In ASP.NET, of course.

    (You also leave out the part where you have agents scouring the net for information in format X, then packaging it into an intermediate form, for redelivery in format Y over transport Z.)
  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2005
    These Gartner reports have been around for quite a while. Are they really all that useful? It seems to me that Gartner reports are only as good as they aren't relevant. Like 'oh that's interesting but it doesn't matter to me' kind of stuff. For anything actually relevant to your business situation
  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2005
    Right or wrong, who cares, time will show. There is one thing that I hate about RSS - the polling and the repeated download of data (and the coupling with HTTP). Some sort of publisher-subscriber with differential updates would be so much better for performance and bandwidth...