A Sign of Things to Come in RSS?

Update: NewsGator has announced new releases for FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The good news is each one of them is free. I guess going free means NewsGator wants to aggressively promote the use of its products, particularly by employees as it pushes harder into the enterprise market.

Slowly but surely, RSS is starting to work its way into the mainstream as more people realize it’s an efficient way to distribute and consume content.

While there were several major developments last year such as the emergence of Google Reader and Google’s purchase of FeedBurner, 2008 could see even more activity and, hopefully, more interest in RSS and the market overall.

One of the more intriguing areas is RSS readers. While there are plenty of options such as Google Reader, Bloglines and NewsGator, there is probably lots of room left for new players to establish a foothold. One of the companies battling for a piece of the pie is Waterloo, Ont.-based AideRSS, which has raised a seed round from Tech Capital Partners and some Canadian angels (note: it’s good to see that there are actually Canadian angels still around!).

In a press release, AideRSS said the funding “will provide the resources for AideRSS to continue to develop leadership in the growing marketing for RSS filtering and ranking tools which help improve personal productivity”.

For people not familiar with AideRSS, they have develop a reader that uses a “social engagement” ranking system to determine what blog posts are the most compelling. It’s based on the idea that the more feed subscriptions people have, the more difficult it becomes to read the good stuff. From using AideRSS, there’s definitely something there. My advice is some of the financing be use to improve the user interface so the service and the features become more accessible.

From a big-picture perspective, it will be interesting to see whether the AideRSS financing is a harbinger of things to come. Is the RSS market getting enough traction that it’s interesting for investors?

For more, check out ReadWriteWeb where Marshall Kirkpatrick calls AideRSS “one of one of my favorite tools on the market right now”. StartupNorth notes that AideRSS’ PostRank technology is now patent pending, My take on the RSS reader market can be found here.

Technorati Tags: AideRSS, RSS, Veture Capital