Niall Kennedy has an interesting post on his weblog titled, “Authenticated and private feeds” that reminded me of our early experience with SocialMail. When we launched SocialMail we had a few people who used the platform to publish their personal email via RSS. One prominent venture capital firm made this mistake and very quickly they began to see their emails appear in Technorati. Very quickly they learned what Niall commented about today:

Some syndication feeds are not meant to be displayed for the world to see. Our everyday lives contain private and confidential data we wouldn’t want anyone else to see, and especially not search. There are a few options for trying to keep things private in your feed aggregator but the implementations require proper coding and privacy from all implementors. Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract. Data in the wrong hands could be dangerous, and many companies will stay away from the feed syndication space until they feel their users’ personal data is secure.

Niall’s post does a great job of summing up the various types of RSS security including: “Security through obscurity”, “Permission-based exclusion” and “HTTP Authentication”. His point is that adoption of RSS (feeds in general) could be significantly enhanced if large publishers knew their client’s data was private and secure. He suggests further “cooperation and collaboration” of security formats to get us past the current fears. Charlie Wood, our buddy from Austin, commented on Niall’s post that his service, Spanning Salesforce, helps add secure feeds to Salesforce.com (http authentication and ssl). He notes:

The problem I’ve run into is support on the client side. As you point out, most of the hosted readers (with the notable exception of NewsGator Online) don’t support secure feeds. Disappointingly, neither does the Windows RSS Platform. (It supports NTLM/Kerberos, but not Basic HTTP Auth. Microsoft says such support was planned, but was the victim of time constraints. Uh, ok.)

I wrote about Upcoming a while back in a post titled, “My Favorite Social Tools: Upcoming” and I am pleased to announce that Upcoming is getting better. Yahoo has announced they have added a number of new features including:

• Undiscovered Events: now Yahoo! Local events are automatically included in metros in an effort to kick-start slow moving metros like Dallas.
• Event Filters: making RSS or iCal feeds better.
• Flickr Photos for Events: add your upcoming tag for an event to a flickr photo and Flickr will auto add a link back to the Upcoming page and vice versa.
• Buddy Icons: I could care less, but if you are excited about using your Flickr buddy icon on Upcoming - woot! you are going to be happy.
• New Events Pages
• New User Experience

Alexander & I have been working a lot lately on all the Big in Japan tools. Lots of changes to PodServe, revamping FrankenFeed in Rails and with the new user experience tweaks we’ve been doing to all the tools, and launching the remaining tools. (Note to self: doing ten apps at once is not a good idea.) We posted up SocialMail for a bit of feedback, and we’re getting it.

What’s SocialMail? It’s a tool that lets you get any email as an RSS feed. Now, for non-geeks, that means you don’t have to keep piling on your Inbox just to stay connected with people. For me, and perhaps for many of you, email is just not as effective anymore. If I’m out for half a day, my email piles up so much that I’m not as effective in paying attention to things. I’m managing most of my projects through various Basecamps, and getting feed updates on new actions and such.

You can use SocialMail to:

• Forward any email to an RSS feed, tracking it in your newsreader or republishing to a blog. For instance, it might be handy to have all support@ emails republished to an internal blog where your team has better access to them.
• Create non-managed email discussion lists. Want to have a quick talk about Bay Area Hiking? Create BayHikes@biggu.com and let everyone interested subscribe to that feed. They don’t have to give you an email address, nor do they have to unsub and manage their participation when they tire of the conversation. They simply unsub from the feed. Then, again, you can republish the information to a blog, etc., making it more searchable, indexable, easier to interact with than typical email.
• Share common addresses. Instead of having one person responsible for sales@ or support@, create a SocialMail feed and let everyone in the company have access to these public emails.

I’m sure our users will come up with many more things, but we’ve started the ball rolling. Read Alexander’s write-up or check out what TechMeme is tracking on this new tool.

Brian is going to do a full post on SocialMail, but I thought I would mention that it was turned on last week. For those of you who use various Big in Japan tools, you will note that SocialMail is the first example of our new login and footer design (no more sidebar). All of the tools will adopt these two SocialMail features. Otherwise check it out…

Steve Gillmor says the truck is already half-way over Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson, who he calls a ‘pinhead’ re: Davidson’s views on partial text feeds.