Feedster, the news and commentary search engine, currently indexes over 670,000 feeds. Scott Rafer joined the company as President and CEO in October, 2003. Before that, he co-founded WiFinder, a directory of public access Wi-Fi, and Fresher Information, a provider of content indexing software. His personal blog is License-Exempt Soweto. A few weeks ago, we sat down at a cafe in San Francisco and talked about Feedster and the future of RSS. Here's the conclusion of our conversation: 

Harold Check: Of the big companies out there now?Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay?which do you think really gets RSS, on a corporate level? Which will be the first to make a move as a company?

Scott Rafer: The first group that will make a successful move, as a company, I believe, is Yahoo. It is the quickest way for them to get real revenue around this stuff. Yahoo! News being the biggest news site on the planet has a lot to do with that. I'm not privvy to specific plans, but if you look at the way their business models work, in general, they have a lot more at stake. And with the moves Reuters is making, their business is more Reuters-dependent and they're going to be forced to move much quicker. There are people inside Microsoft that get it, clearly, and people inside Google who get it, but at a corporate level there isn't the prioritization or big-dollar interest. Google can't become more successful as Google by giving a damn. Same with AOL. Same with Microsoft. The Amazon guys, they get it. Amazon Top Products and similar stuff is available through RSS feeds. I think Amazon will start selling books as serials through RSS?that kind of thing will happen.

HC: As far as ecommerce is concerned, how will transactions work through RSS?

SR: RSS is still served off of web servers. It's still H-T-T-P-colon, and that helps. From an ecommerce point-of-view, it helps because all the SSL and HTTPS stuff can be carried over. I would follow the money in terms of RSS and ecommerce?there's greater innovation where's the greater cash. Dog food online isn't going to be the first RSS-ecommerce story. Porn and travel, on the other hand, probably are.

For the mainstream example, let's look at travel. Travel is actually leading a lot on online innovation because the advertising dollars are so high. We've moved from cost-per-impression to cost-per-click, and next is cost-per-transaction. Travel, led by Hotels.com, has already moved strongly in that direction. I suspect that people will figure out how to do good travel deals in RSS before anything else.

In Europe, there are a couple of discount airfare sites that are pulling out nice feeds of this sort. These little metasearch startups are building these really nice maps of current travels deals. If you want to go from Helsinki to Rome via Barcelona, it's four airlines, but it's only about $300. These startups are spitting out search feeds, reminiscent of Feedster, but with a much smaller data set. Here in the states, there's a great little search startup called Mobissimo that's out-Orbitzing Orbitz. And there are a bunch of garage sites behind them that are putting feeds out, the same sort of thing that Mobissimo is doing. Travel will probably be the first place where ecommerce really hits RSS. And auctions will follow soon after. Someone, within 2005, will start trying to complete transactions by RSS. It won't be mainstream, necessarily.

The sleeper organization is all of this is Interactive Corp. Those guys are quiet, which, since they're led by Barry Diller, is shocking. The social network inside of Evite is moving. A social network built out of people you go to parties with works out pretty well. Diller is sitting there, cranking out commerce, and I would be suprised if he didn't do something interesting and innovative in this area pretty quick. They already bought ZeroDegrees, a pre-revenue social network. Much earlier than Tickle, which Monster just bought. They must have needed infrastructure to back up Evite.

The jobs sector is also going to be huge for RSS, as Craigslist has proven. RSS aggregator adoption in San Francisco took off when the jobs part of Craigslist added RSS. Everyone was like "I'm going to miss that next accounting job!" And now everyone just calms down, goes back to work, and watches the RSS reader.

HC: Where do you think RSS reading is going to end up?

SR: As part of the browser and as part of the email client. There's two schools of thought. I happen to be a browser guy. Half of Feedster are email guys and half are browser guys. It's a cognitive thing. I'm one of those tidy little "keep everything out of my email" people. My browser is where I make my mess.

HC: My feed reader, more than my browser, more than my email client, more than my social network, is a powerful reflection of who I am. And right now, that's very rudimentary. I can only subscribe, unsubscribe, read, and prioritize. When will we see tools that really leverage that data?

SR: Scoble would say that the Longhorn desktop, which will certainly include an aggregator, will take your OPML file and do something interesting with that. And with the Google desktop search app that eveyone has been talking about, Evan would probably say the same thing. The rest of us, who are mere mortals, say "If you publish it, we can help you."

There's a bunch of people who do publish their OPML files, and it's standard within TypePad now to publish them. We crawl them, and so, as relevancy builds over time, we'll certainly have to weight things that people are actually bothering to read.

My business during the bust was a hot-spot search engine called WiFinder, which is still going. There's a bunch of people who care when I blog about wireless, and in my first degree of social network there are all these people who also have something to say about wireless. So, there's a certain crowd of people who might say "I would like to see either all the feeds or all the postings that mention the term 'wireless' within one or two degrees of Scott Rafer." In that sense, OPML within the social overlay might be interesting.

You've got people like Tribe.net, who now have feeds coming out each tribe. More interesting than my actual social network are the communities of interest that I belong to. There's a group in D.C. that I work with called Public Knowledge. There's an Orkut Public Knowledge community and so much more interesting that one degree of Rafer is everyone in that Orkut community looking through their OPML files for mentions of "broadcast flag" or whatever. Much more so than pure social networks, the aggregated OPML files across a community of interest is probably important. And you'll opt in or not when you join a community, but enough people will opt in to make it useful.

HC: Which of the social networking sites is making the best use of RSS?

SR: Tribe is the only one that's making use of RSS right now. All this semantic web stuff is derived from a file format called RDF. RSS is a very simple version of that. The next one to gain any popularity is FOAF, which stands for "friend of a friend." Under the hood, several of the social networks, LinkedIn, Tribe, maybe a couple of the others, are FOAF-based, and it's very easy for them to start turning all those relationships into feeds, if they want. And that's what I personally want, given my own habits. I know a lot of people in my "second degree" in LinkedIn. If I could have a feed of my second degree, as it increases, so I could go into my RSS aggregator and just hit links for "Yes, I know that guy" or "No, don't know him," they would end up with a much richer database, knowing more about me and my network. It would be really time efficient, and I'd be even more likely to pay for their service when they start charging.