Nooked sees RSS tracking customers

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 17

CEO Fergus Burns (View image) of Nooked, an Irish RSS service company, says Web publishers will be tweaking the feeds, in growing numbers, to follow customers. His prediction: Publishers will offer customized features and richer content to RSS subscribers who provide them with profiles. Then they will be able to track customer behavior and send along targeted ads with the feeds. “Right now, it’s so anonymous,” he says. “It’s impossible even to know how many subscribers you have.”

This trend, if it takes off, is sure to cause an uproar in the RSS world.

A couple other notes from Burns, who stopped by our offices. Nooked has just signed up its one thousandth corporate RSS customer. But he says the trend won't take off big time within corporations until next year--after Microsoft releases its next version of Internet Explorer, which is expected to feature an RSS reader.

Also, if you're interested in which companies offer RSS feeds, check out Nooked's feed directory.

One more prediction from Burns. He says that podcasting will cause many more firings than blogging ever has. "You haven't seen anything yet." Why? People relax when they talk on a podcast, he says, and forget to edit themselves.

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