I read the latest post from Charlie Wood with great interest. He talked to all kinds of enterprise customers who are thinking about RSS and adoption of readers. What were the problems that they were thinking about? He points to 2 major problems- internal email spam, and brand monitoring. I can't relate to internal email spam (Onfolio is still a small company!), but I definitely use my feeds to keep an eye on the Onfolio brand.
Taking a closer look at the feeds that I subscribe to, I have 4 categories of feeds that I am currently subscribed to:
1) Search feeds that monitor Onfolio.
I have feeds from Blogdigger, IceRocket, MSN, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, Yahoo News, as well as feeds from our customer forums. I read every single one of the posts that come into these feeds. If you forced me to stop using Onfolio (or any other feed reader), this is what I would miss more than anything. Interestingly, these are also the feeds that generate the most junk for me (ads in some, 30% junk rate, etc...). I can live with that to be notified when someone writes something about Onfolio, though!
2) Feeds from people that I know
My colleagues, friends (near and far) do sometimes have blogs. When they do, I like being subscribed because its an easy way to keep up with whats going on with them. This is probably the second most important use for me.
3) 'Magazine' feeds
I have feeds that I enjoy reading, but that I basically wouldn't miss that much if they were gone. Espn feeds, Autoblog, etc. . . These are fun to read, but I don't really care if I miss a post, and honestly it is pretty nice to just navigate to their page when I feel like reading something (similar to how I open Sports Illustrated if I'm bored at home and looking for something to read over breakfast).
4) Feed I wish I wasn't subscribed to
Here's the biggest surprise to me- I am subscribed to at least 5 feeds that I actually never read at all. I have no idea why I've continued to be subscribed to these feeds (Techbargains, you know who I'm talking about!), but I am. I pretty just mark these all as read whenever there are new items in them.
So back to Enterprise RSS- monitoring the brand makes a ton of sense to me as a great use of RSS. I'm not so sure about reducing internal spam. A couple of examples:
1) Group blogs are just like email lists. If you set up a group blog that many people can post to, isn't this just like an email list that many people can send to? What if anyone could post to the 'main company bulletin board blog.' Isn't that just another inbox to spam? Maybe the difference is that at least you can unsubscribe to the group blogs, but you can't get off the 'all' list? But if you unsubscribe, do you miss the news that the office is closing early next Wednesday?
2) Companies have email lists now- and its pretty straightforward to do things like not let anyone send an email to all@company.com. Maybe they should look into that first before abandonding the e-mail platform, adding a new inbox to all users desktops, and trying to make everyone be a blogger?
3) Since email isn't going anywhere, should we make every employee read internal blogs too? Since sending email isn't going anywhere, should we really make every employee write blogs too?
I am hot and cold on the whole thing, because RSS and aggregators are easy to be hot and cold on. They are great and addictive, but a little hollow at the same time. I guess that's the fun part about working in this segment, though- there is more to think about, to learn about, or to be hot and cold about every day.
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