Feedburner CEO Interview: Dick Costolo, via Wallstrip

Given the seemingly-already-announced-but-not-yet-confirmed acquisition of Feedburner by Google, a timely interview.

The value that Mr. Costolo discusses concerning the Internet and need for analytics by publishers is absolutely true. The same need however exists within the enterprise, albeit in a somewhat different manner. Content publishers want to know a lot about who is subscribing to the feed. There is also the obvious advertising opportunity that is very synergistic. The more you know about the feed and subscriber, the better you can augment the feed with contextual advertising. Within the enterprise, strategists need to think about XML feeds in somewhat different terms. Clearly, XML syndication has some value in terms of communication channels and information delivery - but that benefit is somewhat linear. The more transformational impact occurs when you can leverage the analytics around the feed as a community-building mechanism and as a method to influence the feed reader to take some action.

Community-building: Because a feed management system is aggregating information it can correlate interesting patterns based on a variety of usage trends (e.g., overall subscriptions, attention data, which feed items are saved, discarded, which feeds are read more often than others, etc). This could result in the feed management system playing an important social networking mediation role in terms of connecting individuals, groups, teams and communities that might have strong or weak ties.

Call-to-action: You can augment a feed with additional data that signal the actions other people are taking on the feed (e.g., tags, bookmarks). You could conceivable inserts other types of pointers to discussion forums or virtual workspaces or to start a workflow or to tag/bookmark the feed as part of an activity task. For instance, a feed from a call center community blog summarizing findings on ways to improve customer self-service comes into my feed reader. Rather than the feed coming in as just pure content with a link back to that community blog, the feed to me appears different because the feed management system knows something about me. It knows from my profile, or perhaps from other observational data, that I happen to be very interested or actually working on voice response activities. So my feed has some additional data appended which might include methods for that enables me to share that information with the rest of my project team.

An intranet version of Feedburner is an interesting capability. Right now, vendors like Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator are best positioned to execute on such concepts.