WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MASHUP RSS, IM, AND PUBLISHING SERVICES?
So remember that prediction I made back in 2004, the one about mobile busting out in some kind of Web 2.0 way in 2005? And how it didn't happen, so I repeated it again this year? Well, I was wrong.
Context & Ripple Effects
Battelle closes 2005 by conceding his twice-made prediction — that mobile would break out 'in some kind of Web 2.0 way' — simply didn't happen in 2005, then pivots the year-end post into an open design question: what breaks loose when RSS, instant messaging, and publishing services are combined? It reads less like a forecast than a hypothesis handed to his readers.
The question lands on receptive ground: Matt McAlister had already laid out a new content-distribution plan for online publishers weeks earlier, framing feeds not as a sidebar feature but as the core channel. Battelle's mashup framing pushes that same argument toward notification layers (IM) and authoring services, making feed-centric publishing the through-line of the year's closing debate.
First-order effects
- Bloggers and small publishers reading both pieces get a concrete experiment to try: treat the RSS feed plus an IM presence as a combined distribution surface rather than separate tools.
Second-order effects
- If publishers shift weight to feeds and notifications, aggregators and messaging clients become the chokepoints between writer and reader — the layer where attention is won or lost moves off the publisher's own page.
Third-order effects
- A feed-plus-notification model points toward content designed for machines and intermediaries first, human destination pages second — the structural inversion that feed-era commentary was circling at the close of 2005.
The trend: Online publishing is migrating from destination-site thinking toward feed- and notification-centered distribution, with each year-end prediction cycle serving as a public stress-test of how fast that shift arrives.