Movement
So what do we have here? So the problem is that RSS-I, RSS for Interactions, sounds like a carpal tunnel problem, and besides RSS is not technically necessarily. So the name is Snap: Syndicated Next Action Pattern.
Snap is a way of syndicating interactions with applications so you never need to visit the website. Newsreaders are powerful enough to have forms and perform actions in place. I’ve just demonstrated a todo list application where the tasks move round multiple states, without leaving my newsreader.
Just with Dentrassi, there are a lot of places to take it.
Because it runs locally, it could interact with my local calendar and with the todos stored there. I could syndicate in todos from other people in my company, to work together on those too.
This would be the perfect interface to Mailman, or Trac for managing bugs, or my Facebook friends list. Or it would be great for playing multi-player games like Scrabulous, or writing an editorial workflow system with editors, subeditors and journalists at a newspaper, or even as a way of writing and managing the posts and comments at my blog.
All of these actions can be mixed together, where I’m most ready to encounter them.
It’s not perfect, of course. Newsreaders would have to do a little work to support Snap properly, maybe presenting the interaction forms like Podcast enclosures or dialog boxes, and having a way of dealing with stale forms. We’ve built in a system in Dentrassi which works around the problem of updating the same task from two different places, but you still can’t work offline.
Anyway, I think this is a pattern worth using. Just like RSS syndicates media to humans, and an API gives access to an application for machines, Snap sits between the two.