“The priorities seem wrong here - I don’t see this step getting us any closer to getting better services when there are other much more fundamental issues that need solving.”

Alex Barnett blog : Syndicated search engines broken - Part II

Alex definitely has a point regarding the state of feed search: as he’s previously pointed out, there is no Google for feed searching. A problem that definitely needs to be solved.

However, I would argue that feed privacy is as important an issue as feed search and that Bloglines priorities are just fine.

The company I work for, having recently rolled out a new website, for the first time is exploring (with no shortage of enthusiasm and support from me) publishing via RSS. Among other things, we’d like to publish some privileged (and in some cases somewhat confidential) content for our partners. We’d love to encourage our readers to subscribe to an RSS feed for marketing news that’s tailored to our dealers and other partners. We could work around the authentication issues, but were one of our subscribers to use their private, authenticated feed in a web-based aggregator even once the data therein would be public.

To be clear, from what I glean from the Bloglines proposal it’s not a complete solution to the problem. Issues such as republication and universality are unresolved. But to my mind, the problem of feed control this is a serious stumbling block in the full usefulness of RSS to the Enterprise space, and a problem that needs a resolution, and I support Bloglines’s efforts as a gesture in the right direction, which is more than anyone else is proposing.