I'm going to repeat a lot of other people and jump on the RSS has barely taken off outside of the early adopters and RSS hasn't really been sold as a way to get information. - Justin Yost from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Maybe I'm one of the only people that agrees with your post. We did an in depth investigation on Enterprise RSS in our company. We built our own feedreader some time ago, but this app was outdated, compared to Google Reader and the like. And because we thought feedreaders/feedreading matured we were quite convinced we'd find a vendor that would meet our needs. Sorry to say we didn't find one. One of the main reasons is security. We wrote about it <a href="http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008...">here</a>. Newsgator seems to be the only one responding to our wishlist and actually says they will address our needs soon. So, for now I'm using RSSpopper to read internal feeds. This implies there is a big opportunity in this market. If you get things right here (and why not just start by copying Google Reader and adding security features?), you're in big business. So, Enterprise RSS is not dead, but it hasn't really come alive yet. - Samuel Driessen from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Enterprise RSS sounds a lot like Pointcast/Marimba/[generic "push" technologies from 1998] when you sell it as just a technology. As others have said already, you might as well have said "receiving asynchronous updates about activity in the enterprise is dead" and then your message would have been clearer and easier to discard as misguided/addressing a problem that doesn't exist. - Martin Dengler from FriendFeed MT Plugin

From my point of view, RSS is a very useful technology, but totally unsexy to the average person. I've found that with clients, I skip the explanation of what RSS is, why I think it's handy and move straight to the demonstration. As soon as the client sees that they can track all mentions of their brand in blogs, all posts and press releases written by competitors, their eyes light up and it starts making sense. How the information gets there is generally irrelevant to most, as long as consumption is easy and non-time consuming. So while I agree that Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines or Netvibes might not be the ultimate in advanced RSS readers, if they can provide a simple introduction to the benefits of RSS, we may see more users of enterprise-focused RSS tools at some point in the future. - Vero Pepperrell from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Companies don't adopt protocols - they adopt products. Companies didn't adopt HTTP - they started using IE and IIS (alas!). There's a good reason for this: to a user the value proposition of a protocol is just about zero. The value of a product that uses the protocol is somewhat better. For RSS readers, the core value is simply this: it allows you to browse hundreds of sites much more efficiently than with a browser. But the problem is that most users aren't saddled with the "deluge of sites" problem and have settled into a comfortable routine of checking one or two portal sites, or finding ad hoc results with Google. This makes sense because portals are also aggregators of information, but they provide even more of a value: they choose which sites and which stories to show. This is huge value, and it makes sense for most users to go this route. RSS is a critical tool for emerging or cross-disciplinary research, especially anything involving the internet itself - after all, the internet is still invent - Josh from FriendFeed MT Plugin

I agree with the sentiment here in that nobody really offered a complete product that could integrate RSS deep into business processes where the value could have been seen. Honestly it should be companies more like SAP and Oracle that are responsible for enterprise RSS adoption rather than the companies you mention in the article like Newsgator. - Devlin Dunsmore from twhirl

Reading through all the above comments, I would sum it up like this: RSS is a Connection Layer, it provides the Glue between where things happen (Blogs, Help Desks, Project Activity, etc.) and where it is consumed (Email Inbox, Feed Reader or Dashboard). If I where the executive of a manufacturing company, I would love to have real-time updates to everything going on. But that depends on one thing: proper filtering: context, relevancy, immediacy. Let people decide themselves on how to get their information, but innovate on providing "the right information". Take JakeBe as an adapter for internals, PostRank for externals and mash it up in Yahoo Pipes. Syndicate it in Feedburner and people can have it via Email as well. Or go the iGoogle route straightaway. It's not about RSS, it's about combining information sources and output formats to provide value. That's the BI everybody is after. - Björn Klose from FriendFeed MT Plugin

I think the reason it hasn't caught on is pretty obvious: companies don't want their employees reading news all day, and employees don't have time to spend all day reading news. And solutions to this (software installations combined with good support and policies) aren't that well known. - Chris Dymond from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Thank you very much Marshall for starting this conversation about RSS and information overload. This is a perfect example of why I love blogs :-) I have been through all comments and would like to offer a quick synthesis of the key ones I have picked up before suggesting anything ;-) As <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...">Rick</a> first put it, of course we are not talking about RSS adoption per se, but rather tools / solutions that make use of it as readers inside companies : portals / dashboards / or so-called RSS readers, as web or desktop clients As <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...">Eric</a> puts it, this adpotion poses a challenge : incorporating in a new tool or in an existing one (eg MS Outlook or Mac OS X Mail), especially when individual users are mostly prohibited from doing so (<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...">Nigel</a>) Then <a href="http://ww - Amaury de Buchet from FriendFeed MT Plugin