David Cummings on Startups

The RSS-Driven Startup Dashboard

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David Cummings

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RSS is great in that so many apps support publishing and consuming the XML format. So much so that it really becomes the core plumbing to drive a startup dashboard. Tools like Google Reader, Socialite Mac, and Thunderbird support bringing in RSS feeds along with other types of information, perfect for creating a central hub of data.

Here are some potential items for the RSS-driven dashboard:

As you can, this is really a list of critical business apps and RSS provides a mechanism to centralize the most important information for each, which in turn represents the current pulse for the entire business. Of course, this could lead to information overload but I’ve found it’s better to have too much information compared to too little.
What else? What do think of an RSS-driven dashboard and what feeds would you add?

Comments

3 responses to “The RSS-Driven Startup Dashboard”

  1. Mike Schinkel Avatar
    Mike Schinkel

    Interesting post.

    A good friend of mine recognized what you mention about 6 years ago. He launched a product called RSS Bus (http://rssbus.com/) which is a spin off of his other very successful software company, but he doesn’t want the two mentioned in the same place so I won’t mention his other company here. You should check out RSSBus because I think it can really streamline what you are talking about.

    That said, I really hate programming with XML (and hence with RSS). For some reason XML doesn’t map cleanly to data structures in a programming language. At least not in PHP. I far prefer dealing with JSON. Maybe the next decade will see the rise of JSONFeed (which I just made up) and my friend will launch a new product called JSONBus? But I doubt it.

    Reply
  2. David Cummings Avatar
    David Cummings

    Thanks Mike! It looks like they are part of /n software: http://rssbus.com/company/
    I agree that JSON is much better.

    Reply
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