Is RSS the new WWW?

Published: 17 April 2007.

Just when you thought you were getting pretty chic with this www stuff – along comes RSS. What the heck is RSS I hear you ask? It’s the new technology that will almost certainly affect how you use the internet.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, it allows websites to store content so that is universally spoken and understood by other websites and software. Literally tens of thousands of websites and programs already support RSS including Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and InternetExplorer.

Is your hair standing on end yet? Probably not – but when you start to actually consider the ramifications this will have on the internet in the next couple of years – its pretty staggering. As an internet user – you can subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds and these will be delivered directly to you.

Imagine, for example, you wanted to stay up-to-date with the latest Management Rights for sale, the instant they hit the internet. With MS Office 2007 Outlook – You’d simply subscribe to http://www.thepropertymanager.com.au/rss.xml and the latest listings would show up in your email inbox, the second they were posted. Because your software is fetching this data, rather than a portal posting it to you – your details are completely confidential – not even the portal is aware you have subscribed, or unsubscribed, as the case may be.

Do you have a personal Google home page? If so – you can now get a snapshot of 10 latest Management Rights listings delivered directly to the front page of your Google. In fact, Google have developed their very own RSS reader (http://www.google.com/reader/view/). Users can now search and browse content off the internet from a multitude of different websites through a consistent Google interface system. No longer will you need to waste time deciphering clunky website interfaces to read their content!

What about your own website? How would you like to output all the listings you post on ThePropertyManager.com.au directly to your own site? With RSS – its easy. A broker, for example, could simply put a link on their own site to their RSS feed (which is displayed on any of the current listings on ThePropertyManager.com.au) and their visitors would be able to see all their listings at a glance. No complicated administration systems required. Not only that, but users could even subscribe to receive new listings whenever they posted any! Further more – with a few simple adjustments – a web designer could add a stylesheet to this feed and the broker’s listings would display within their own website in exactly the same style as the rest of their site.

The next time your business is considering a website you should insist on RSS syndication support. There will almost certainly come a time (in the very near future) when these RSS feeds overtake the www as the preferred medium for internet users searching and reviewing information on the internet.