I just read the San Jose Mercury News article that was "catching up" with Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington. The article was a quick Q&A about Web 2.0, his popular barbeques in Atherton, etc. Toward the end he is asked what is overhyped and of course the "RSS Area" is mentioned. Attensa's $9M series B is mentioned. SearchFox's demise is mentioned. Dave Winer's new reader is in there too. I also learned i am one of some 20,000 foks that regularly read his blog! Wow. But I digress.
I guess for the most part I agree with the "ridiculous" nature of interest in RSS. It is my job and our marcom folk's job to keep beating the drum on our positioning of focusing on information overload generated by RSS. We believe at Attensa that the current sources and volume of RSS is only the tip of the iceberg. Blogs and News Headlines helped relaunch RSS, but it is the expected pervasive use of RSS as a communications vehicle in the enterprise (and throughout the supply chain) that will drive massive use of RSS. Checkout basecamp, a collaborative web application, which allows participants to receive RSS updates of any changes or updates to a project. We think this type of use of RSS will dwarf blog updates and/or newsheadlines in the business world. That will cause consdierable information overload. At Attensa we aim to solve THAT problem with our AttentionStream technology.
Attensa often gets lumped in to these conversations about either Outlook 12 launching our business into obscurity or compares our client software to companies focused just on RSS aggregation. So it is up to me to keep beating the drum of "we can't wait till Outlook 12 it will be AWESOME for our business!" Lastly, and having been here before, I can honestly maintain we are still probably most like a stealth company. I write this because the core of our technology can be applied to a hell of a lot more than just RSS (and will be) and our business model has not been fully exposed either.
P.S. We have no interest in being a media company like some of our contemporaries. We ARE a conventional Client/Server/Infrastrucuture company. We intend to partner (via best of class synchronization and more) with the Yahoo/Google/MSN/Bloglines folks - not compete with them.
