How Apple's early VR experiments accidentally led to RSS Industry talk has it that Apple is working on "something" to do with virtual reality. If true, it will not be Cupertino's first such effort: twenty years ago the company's first attempt in the field flopped, but ultimately and unintentionally spawned the RSS metadata format used by just about every website everywhere. This …
I remember all those "fads" with Portals being the way to access the web, how "Push" was going to kill the browser, how XYZ was going to kill the browser, how Active Desktop would kill the browser (instead, it killed the PC it was running on!), how every little damn thing would kill the browser...
Ha!
Not only was it not VR, it was really more of a 3D hypercard UI for the web. The author apparently doesn't understand what it was, despite the example he provides. How in the world is moving through links "VR", except in Hollywood's odd vision of how hacker's computers work.
And I got to this story via my RSS reader (Liferea). I monitor about 5 dozen feeds in my reader. Several hundred headlines go through my reader every day. Without RSS, it would be impractical to follow such a diverse array of sources of information. With it, I just have to glance at the icon in the launcher bar (Ubuntu) to see how many unread stories there are, click on it to go to the desktop with the reader and mark interesting ones, mark the rest as seen, and then click on the winnowed down list of stories to read them in Firefox.
I can't imagine how I ever did without one. If a web site which publishes regular content doesn't have an RSS feed, it may as well not exist so far as I am concerned.
If you use a bit of imagination, you can see that it is useful for more than just news. A lot of internal business applications would be good as RSS feeds. For example, is some automatic process late or delayed? Make monitoring it an RSS feed. People who care about it can subscribe or unsubscribe themselves as they see fit, and you don't have to fart about with email subscribe or unsubscribe. Since there are standard RSS readers out there already, you don't have to create your own custom "app" client. There are loads of other potential applications.
I've implemented RSS feeds, and it's no more difficult than creating a web page. I just picked out an existing RSS feed that I liked, picked apart the source, and used the general layout as a template for my own.
RSS deserves to be recognised as one of the nearly invisible bits of glue holding the Internet together.
Check out Desktop Ticker (no affiliation to myself btw)
http://www.battware.co.uk/desktopticker.htm
Not dependant on a browser, stand alone program, has a nice little customizable rss ticker I can position just about anywhere on my desktop. No icons to click, just headlines scrolling past like those annoying mid program advertisements on American TV, but without being intrusive.
After being unable to find a browser ticker that worked to my needs, this is the best I could find online today. Not sure how I would keep up with the news without it.
Pointcast ate your bandwidth, especially when several dozen people at your small biz had it loaded, and you have a tiny DSL link. We had to outlaw it.
However I did use that "hot sauce" plugin. It was slower than molasses on a standard 486, which is probably a big reason it died. It would probably actually work today.
VR is only finally taking off because there's finally 1) decent resolution small displays, courtesy of cell phones, and 2) graphics hardware hefty enough to drive TWO of them, for the stereoscopic effect, and fast enough to have very little lag, to avoid nausea.
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