“RSS is key to how people will use the Internet in the future by automatically delivering the information that is important to them,” Dean J. Hachamovitch ’90, general manager for Longhorn browsing and RSS at Microsoft, said in a company press release.
But RSS is not without flaws, at least in its current incarnation. Like much else on the Internet, RSS has been troubled by spam.
“As much as a third of what we see coming across the transom in terms of RSS feeds is spam,” Palfrey said. “Similar problems are occurring in RSS as in other parts of the web. You’ll need similar kinds of security and authentication.”
Another criticism is based on the fund’s business plan, not on the technology itself.
Some Silicon Valley technology bloggers have criticized the fund for the narrowness of its scope, comparing it to an unsuccessful Java-targeted fund from the late 1990s. The focus on a specific technology could increase the fund’s risk to investors, its critics have suggested.
—Staff writer Samuel C. Scott can be reached at sscott@fas.harvard.edu.