Over the weekend I received a couple of emails from JadedPixel in regards to Shopify now being in beta.

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Coté at the People over Process blog has an interesting series going on about Management by Feeds in response to Marshall’s recent post here pointing out some of the areas that might make Management by Feeds difficult to adopt.

I have some strong opinions on the points Coté raises here that I plan to post a little later on once I have the time to write them, but in the mean time, check out his posts:

Part 1: Feed Filtering

Part 2: Getting Social Behind the Firewall

Part 3: The RSS Golden Hammer

My favorite quote so far:

we’re trying to use the software to strengthen the social bond that you would otherwise build face to face. As I said early on, this is one of my key understandings/desires of social software: a proxy and amplifier for what you would do face-to-face.

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[Marshall Kirkpatrick is fond of feeds. As the author of Weblogs Inc.’s Social Software Weblog, an interviewer and presenter with NetSquared and consultant for The Committee to Protect Bloggers , he is imminently qualified to speak not only on the benefits of feeds but possible obstacles. In this, our second in a series of guest-blogged posts, Marshall tackles potential bottlenecks in the process of management by feeds.]

I love RSS, absolutely love it. I love search feeds, enclosures, feeds displayed in HTML, filtered feeds, feeds bundled in OPML and IM notification of updated feeds. I love the flexibility of feeds. I really like the idea of management by feed as well, but I’m worried about two bottlenecks that challenge its viability. First, management by feed requires effective management of feeds and team members must be relied upon to document updates in a format available by feed.

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The latest Newsweek had the cover story, Putting the ‘We’ in Web. It was a good enough story as these things go, probably pretty informative for people who didn’t know much about Web 2.0, though a bit basic for those who work with it.

The problem is that, although they talked in a seven page article about MySpace, Dabble, Craigslist, Flickr and others, they mentioned RSS only once, briefly.

RSS lets you “subscribe” to targeted information from a Web service in the way you subscribe to magazines.

They don’t deal with the implications of RSS, just shunt quickly into APIs. The one thing all of these companies have in common is that they generate feeds. It’s interesting enough I suppose that you can see and use free photos on Flickr, but the real ground-breaking going on here is the ability to govern information, to bring it together into one place, in one interface, based on what you find important and useful.

Feeds are starting to gain real ground. It’s not just blogs that offer them, not even just other media like the New York Times. They are used in most of these new services and technologies. They allow the user to leave off the puttering around and cherry picking that a “post-scarcity world” of information requires.

Every product created by Sproutit, starting with Mailroom, has a feed. Soon, all of a companies business will be doable, or at least surveyable, within a feed reader.

That’s the real story.

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A new forum for Sproutit.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Social Software Blog (who I hear might be making a guest appearance on this blog soon) recently pointed us to the Moonwatcher Blog, which is the personal blog of Charlie Wood, who also formed an interesting company called Spanning Partners. Both sites are dedicated to covering the emergence of RSS in the Enterprise.

Its true, RSS as a technology is starting to creep into even big enterprise company’s plans. So how does RSS in the Enterprise relate to Management by Feeds?

RSS is a technology. It’s a way of publishing information. To use RSS, you need tools like Mailroom, Basecamp, and Spanning Salesforce to expose the data inside your company through RSS. Management by Feeds is how you use those feeds to make better decisions in less time.

Spanning Partners looks to be doing some important work in helping companies who have already spent the money to deploy big enterprise apps make information from those apps available through RSS. If you use Salesforce, in particular, its worth a look.

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A listen to some new features we added to Mailroom.

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Imagine to my surprise when I saw a comment by Ken Yarmosh on Charles’ posting Management by feed asking about how he keeps up on his 43 feeds. There are various ways of doing it as he mentions in his question.

Are you using internal blogs, have you partnered with a third party RSS provider, or built something yourself?

Yesterday I talked about using NetNewWire as my feed reader which, allows the user to create smart lists and groups. This has been very handy due to the ability to drag and drop (as you should expect from Ranchero Software). But, this is still a desktop app.

So, what options are available online?

I have looked at a couple of options, but one that I have recently been testing (still in its alpha stage) is FrankenFeed, one of the tools from the Big IN Japan toolbox. (I also post my podcast using PodServe, too). This allows you to mash together multiple feeds into a single feed. I like to stay on top of news, so I have created a feed that has several news feeds in it, such as CNet, NewsVine, and Wired.

There are several more options, but that is just one. Every one of us needs to find something that won’t interrupt our workflow and allow us to create as we see fit.

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Peter says he loves Management by Feeds because he can learn about new changes and new bug fixes as soon as they happen. There is nothing like an informed support person to make your customers exceedingly happy.

As Chris said yesterday, he loves Management by Feeds because while he is out on the road meeting investors, arranging our move back to the States, and doing his podcast, he can stay on top of all the news happening in the office. It’s like he is still here.

Shanti loves Management by Feeds because he doesn’t have a manager standing over his shoulder, breathing down his neck while he tries to work. He can focus on coding, knowing that we will all know what he’s up to whenever he checks in some code and it shows up in our feedreaders.

I love Management by Feeds because we have a team of 12 people spread all over the world and I need to know what all of them are doing. I might spend my whole day on the phone or IM with people, but thanks for feeds, I don’t generally have to interrupt them unless we have something important to talk about or I just want to be social. (happens occasionally)

No one likes having to give or listen to long drawn out reports. Everyone loves conversation, debate, and getting things done. Management by Feeds makes work more fun.

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ABout a week ago I was attending one of the best events of the year in the tech community. SXSW. Part of the allure of the event is the diverse background of the participants. Techies, software and hardware gurus, business development, and venture capitalists. Each and every one of them asking the same question? “So, what do you do?” Needless to say my elevator pitch has gotten quite refined.

But, what about the details?

I don’t sweat it anymore. Even if I only get to my computer once a day (that feels like suffocation to a web-app company owner) I feel ‘in-the-loop’ even when I am 1,007 miles away from my closest colleague (that is the distance from Austin, TX to Phoenix, AZ). How? It may sound trite, but RSS feeds.

Being a mac user I have become very fond of using NetNewsWire, now owned by Newsgator Technologies. I know that I don’t need to explain what it does, technically. However, the content that I have subscribed to allows me to be kept current on the decisions of my co-founders, updates in support issues, our development cycle, and my favorite, our sales figures.

Even when my co-founders are 5,523 miles away, their latest thoughts allow me to answer the question, “So, what do you do?” with daily precision.

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In fact, I am writing this from Dallas, TX and just learned that 3 more accounts were opened. Gotta love RSS!

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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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