incuTANK: Sharing ideas and innovation.

Over at Read/Write Web, Marshall Kirkpatrick argues that 2007 was a big year for RSS (Real Simple Syndication). I completely agree - and I even think that RSS feeds will become a lot more important in the future.

Every blog already has a feed, and so does almost every news site. And there’s more: For example, there’s a feed for your del.icio.us bookmarks, one for your Facebook status updates, and so on… And yet, I think that we’ve only just seen the beginning of feedmania. Many people already use RSS readers (like the one from Google) that aggregate the feeds and thus become the one single place where all the relevant information is. So what’s next? Of course: A tool that converts your mail into a feed. And maybe, after that, there will be a feed for your overall energy consumption, allowing you not only to track your consumption but also to share the information with friends and to show off your environmental side. And why not send invoices through a feed? Public alerts?

The future will not only bring more uses for feeds, but will also have feeds that are more customizable. When today you can subscribe, for example, to all items in the New York Times’ “World” section, tomorrow you will be able to subscribe to all items that contain a certain combination of search terms; or to all items with the same tag; or to all items with a maximum length of 150 words; or to all items written by one author (you can already do this on the website of the German newspaper ZEIT); or to a feed combining all this criteria. (As a matter of fact, you can already do all those things using Yahoo! Pipes).

Distributing information through feeds not only allows aggregation on a very customized level - it also allows sharing the information, for example through a social network, or creating mashups with different types of information.

Oh, and of course there’s a business model: Advertising. And the more customizable the feeds become, the more targeted (and thus lucrative) it gets.