RSS/Atom for professional use

Question

I wondered if anyone can give an example of a professional use of RSS/Atom feeds in a company product. Does anyone use feeds for other things than updating news?

For example, did you create a product that gives results as RSS/Atom feeds? Like price listings or current inventory, or maybe dates of training lessons?

Or am I thinking in a wrong way of use cases for RSS/Atom feeds anyway?

edit @abyx has a really good example of a somewhat unexpected use of RSS as a way to get debug information from program transactions. I like the idea of this process. This is the type of use I was thinking of - besides publishing search results or last changes (like mediawiki)

Answer 1

I have seen RSS used to syndicate gas prices from a service for a specific zip code.

Answer 2

http://www.immobilienscout24.com/

they use RSS feeds for updates on your search.

Answer 3

Most of the digital libraries uses RSS/ATOM to display their search/results, data update, according to the OAI-PMH protocol

Answer 4

there are many examples. Here are a couple.

SharePoint provides RSS feeds from its lists.

Many faceted navigation products allow you to get an RSS feed based on a selected filter. For example, you can navigate to view 24" LCD Monitors on newegg.com and then get an RSS feed of that view.

Answer 5

Mantis bug tracker includes RSS feeds although I wish they were more configurable. Also we use MediaWiki for documentation which has all sorts of RSS Feeds including a per page watch, and recent changes.

Answer 6

With our internal TRAC server, I'm subscribed to the timeline view for each project that I work on. It's great for keeping track of checkins and bug tickets. This is pretty exclusive to a developer position though.

I also am subscribed to the recent changes for our installation of MediaWiki that we use for our intranet. That way it's easy to see if documents that I need have been changed, or if there's new policies etc.

Our website has a news page that I wrote an RSS feed for as well. While you mentioned that you weren't really interested in recent news, it is nice to keep up with our press releases.

Answer 7

I just added RSS feeds to the ticketing system I use at work (TicketDesk) and that feature should be in the next release of the product.

It's nice because it basically provides me a custom search view of outstanding trouble tickets or work requests that comes to me rather then me having to go to the application. It also allows users to get feeds of issues they may be interested in, but not require them to get emails on each update.

I'm looking at implementing an RSS feed for calls for service that our agency takes, to provide the administrators a quick and easy way to see what has been going on.

Answer 8

Some of my team's new systems generate RSS feeds that the developers syndicate. These feeds push out events that interest the developers at certain times and the information is controlled using different loggers. Thus when debugging you can get the debugging feed, when you want to see completed transactions you go to the transactions feeds etc. This allows all the developers to get the information they want in a comfortable way and without any need to mess a lot with configuration. If you don't want to get it there's no need to remove yourself from a mailing list or edit a configuration file - simply remove the feed and be done with it.

Very cool, and the idea was stolen from Pragmatic Project Automation.

Answer 9

Atom feed documents and Atom entry documents are used as the representation format for RESTful web services that follow the Atom Publication Protocol (AtomPub).

I personally have used syndication feeds to expose a sub-set of the Windows Event Log information so that I could subscribe and be notified of critical events on a server.