Top 10 RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2010

Google Reader
Selected coverage: Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

If you read RSS feeds and you know it, you probably use Google Reader. It’s ok. It’s pretty good, even. It’s not that exciting, but it serves a whole lot of people very reliably and capably. It has survived while everyone else has not. This year we saw former market-leader Bloglines and former innovation leader Newsgator Online close up their RSS readers and send everyone to Google Reader instead. Other services use Google Reader as a place to sync up.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Google almost never kills anything, and there have to be a lot of people internally at the company who depend on Google Reader, too. Unless they’ve all given it up for Twitter.

My6Sense
Selected coverage: My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World

You’re on your phone and you want something good to read? They say that small screens lend to high-quality recommendations of well-targeted content – so why would we read Twitter and Facebook?

My6Sense is a mobile RSS reader that syncs with your Google Reader account (all of it, not just the first one thousand feeds like so many imitations!) and then watches how you interact with the items. It knows when you are reading, it knows when you’ve shared a link. It then offers two views of all your subscriptions: their most recent posts and the My6Sense recommended posts. The service learns from your behavior over time and offers a quality mobile feed reading experience.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It’s probably a slow burn, the company is focusing on monetizing a commercial API. That’s a good business to be in.

Blekko
Selected coverage: How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job

Blekko calls itself a search spam killer but it’s got a whole lot more potential for the power user.

Blekko is a platform for collaboratively edited vertical custom search engines. It eats OPML files, among other things, and its outputs include RSS feeds. You want a feed of updates from 10 key medical sites whenever any news about a particular issue is written about? Blekko can do that. You want to track a collection of blogs that cover a particular topic and get a ping when they write about one company, one concept or one keyword across all their blogs? No problem. It’s great.

A custom search engine creation service with RSS feeds. That deserves a place on this list.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It just launched. When it launched, I said it was too beautiful to live long, but its CEO has been around the block many times and tells me he knows what he’s doing.

Facebook
All RWW coverage of Facebook

Facebook’s syndicated updates from friends, families and media organizations are the single most important way that hundreds of millions of people around the world relate to the power of the feed. The company tried to do a lot this year, but it’s hard to know how drastic the users’ experience will end up being. None the less: Facebook Places alone represents the introduction of a radical new type of knowledge into many peoples’ lives (where the people you know are right now) – and it’s coming to them by feed.

OStatus
Selected coverage: Run Your Own Twitter Clone: Status.net Launches Public Beta

When you hear about Diaspora, when you hear about Status.net, OStatus is what’s under the hood. This open-source amalgamation of communication technology standards is like Twitter for networks that are disconnected, but interoperable. “People on Different Networks Following Each Other” is the OStatus slogan.

What does it mean? Interoperability means social networks compete on features, not control over your friends, because switching costs are removed. You lose nothing if you switch networks.

OStatus didn’t take off like a Tweeting rocket ship this year, but it saw some continued growth, development and attention. Someday, maybe someday, the asynchronous micro-messaging that so many of us find so much value in will break out of the clutches of one single company (wonderful as you are, dear Twitter) and become a real communication platform like the telephone. That’s probably as crazy as imagining a time when AT&T customers can call Verizon customers though, isn’t it?

Not Dead Yet Factor: It’s not dead yet.

Dapper
Selected coverage: How Yahoo’s Latest Acquisition Stole & Broke My Heart

Point and click on almost any field on almost any Web page and Dapper will give you an RSS URL you can use to subscribe to updates from that field, if and when the content there changes. It sounds like a simple thing, but it’s incredibly powerful.

Dapper has been one of my favorite services for years and was joined by Needlebase in the DIY data extraction world that has so much potential.

In recent years, the devil bought Dapper’s soul, turning it into a semantic advertising platform in order to monetize its core technology. Then Yahoo bought the whole company this Fall, which will allow the core feed-extraction tool to remain open, at least for a while longer. To use this incredible tool, you’ve just got to sneak in through the back door at Open.Dapper.net.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It’s not dead yet. Maybe more alive than it’s been in years, in fact.

Honorable mentions:

Yahoo Pipes – definitely not dead yet. The company released an experimental 2.0 version of this wonderful spaghetti pipes tool for RSS magic this year, but few people noticed and the company itself says its products aren’t production ready. YSQL is a better bet, if you’re comfortable working with that. If not, well – Pipes isn’t dead yet.

Twitter – One of these days! Annotations! Meaningful location as a platform! This year had high hopes for Twitter’s technology. The year ended up being about better up-time, a prettier Web site and the company’s nascent ad sales efforts.

Ogre translates spatial files into GeoJSON using a command line tool for use in JavaScript Web apps. Awesome. Some people are using this for sure, to set proprietary geodata free. Too few people, though.

OneSpot – This content recommendation engine does a lot of things, but my favorite thing it does is look at any set of feeds you give it and then suggest thousands of other feeds it believes are related. It’s easy to curate a few hundred top blogs in any field that way.

That’s our list – how does it compare to yours? What’s coming down the line that you think might shake things up in RSS and syndication in 2011? Let us know in comments.

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