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

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 2

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

Answer 3

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.