Dick Costolo: prediction

Transcript context

…The reason that I wanted to bring up SpyOnIt was I’m wondering if it was a predecessor to RSS. I remember going and checking, being gadget blogs every day like, oh, has anything changed? Have they posted new stories? People were just starting to think about like, hey, you can push updates to people on the internet. Is that how you were thinking about it? Yeah. Both SpyOnIt and FeedBurner were really the brainchild of one of my co-founders, Eric Lunt. He had come up with the ideas for both of those companies, and that's correct. The idea behind FeedBurner was just, look, there's going to be this new world of syndication that's important, as people stop going to all these different websites to see if something's happened and start aggregating it or pushing it to individual places. The idea behind FeedBurner was it will be important to sit between publication and subscription because there will be all sorts of interesting things that happened. That intersection of publication and subscription, and we should do that. That was the idea behind FeedBurner. Basically managing syndication feeds for publishers, and doing things to them, and manipulating them to make the subscription experience better and then pushing them out. Long-winded way of saying yes, those two companies were very much related in the way we thought about the future of how content was going to be consumed. We have a lot of younger listeners who probably don't really know what RSS is and it's best explained, I think as a podcast player for text. It's an app that you open with all these different feeds.…

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