Andreessen Comments on RSS

Browser pioneer Marc Andreessen participated in an online chat on The Washington Post's Web site today (reg required) and he had an interesting thing or two to say about RSS...

Washington, D.C.: Do you think RSS is the future of distributing information via the Internet?

Marc Andreessen: It's *a* future of distributing information :-). It's a very useful approach (this is the idea that you read "feeds" of content that are pushed to you, rather than browsing and searching). It's kind of Pointcast done right, for those of us who remember the late, not-much-lamented Pointcast from the late 90's. Plus the approach will work for a lot of other things too like being notified of auction results, new products, new classified ad listings, or whatever. It will work very well and lots of people will use it and the aggregators and software that are designed to support it but it won't replace browsing or searching, I don't think.

It's a good example of how the Internet keeps changing -- since the Internet is built on software, a new software approach like RSS can change how we think of the Internet without requiring anyone to rewire any networks. That's what I really like about the Internet. First it was email, then web, then IM, then Napster/Kazaa, then Apple iChat, now RSS... one thing after another after another...