the Onda

One of the best things that I've learned to do in order to improve my "game-changing technologies predictive power" is to look back in 2,3, and 5 year chunks at what the things were back then that I thought were for sure the up-and-coming winners. It is a sobering exercise for understanding how in technology it is so very easy to confuse a long view for a short distance.

For instance, take web services. Back in 01-02 they were all of the rage. Websites were going to syndicate functionality to everyone, and companies big and small were going to reap huge rewards from weaving all of these new-found APIs together. And sure, 5 years later we've got a collection of interesting services from Amazon/eBay/Google, a bevy of Web 2.0 companies with half-baked APIs (mostly following in the lead of Flickr), and the built in expectation that if you're building a website today, you are a nobody until you can offer an API to your web service.

In the meantime though, only one ubiquitous API has truly emerged: RSS. As Steve Rubel pointed out in the blog post that started me thinking about this again, RSS is now the common glue by which developers can weave blog posts, pictures, tweets, and whatever else into one uniform stream of data to be consumed, remixed, and shared as needed.

And indeed, this is pretty awesome, despite the fact that we're just now scratching the surface. Adam Green (who in my mind is one of Boston's best software minds, a guy that really can span generations with his thinking) told me almost two years ago that right about now developers would be waking up to a "feed management" problem. What is more, he then set out to build the tools needed for addressing some of these challenges. I haven't stayed close enough to what he's done thus far, but I do agree with the notion that most of the interesting opportunities out there today for people working in the consumer Internet revolve around orchestration of different services through "feed management," though not quite in the publish-it-all-this-is-who-I-am-hear-me-roar style that is so prevalent among the Web 2.0 set.

Most "regular folks" don't care to be emitting digital excrement about every part of their lives for all to see, all of the time. And unfortunately, the privacy model for sharing items from feed selectively is either not there (most blogging tools), too cumbersome (Vox), or too coarsely grained (Twitter). Of all of the existing services, I've seen, Facebook's Mini Feed comes the closest to representing real life use cases, but only because Facebook is itself a closed system with a nice natural mechanism for representing friends and colleagues (though we'll see if this scales as the company moves beyond its traditional college demographic).

In order to be able to remix feeds in an interesting way, we need not only a service that sucks up RSS output from all of one's online publishing/communication platforms and normalizes it all, but also one which can then provide the right level of access control to the people and services that are likely to want to consume that amalgam of information. Now, who is working on that part of the feed management problem? Who has the scale and scope to pull it off in a way that both users and developers trust? Or can we pull it off with some combination of OpenId and RSS extensions?

It seems to me that cracking this identity/authentication/access problem is going to open up a whole world of interesting opportunities for syndicated content and services that will go well beyond publishing for most regular folks, but only if it is done in an open and distributed way. Let's just hope it doesn't take another 5 years to get there.

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