Hyperlocal Snackr – Effective Workplace RSS Communication

I’ve got a bit of a love hate relationship with Snackr, Narciso Jaramillo’s AIR based rss ticker (watch the screencast below to see Snackr in action). Watching feeds roll along the ticker fuels an already dangerous information addiction, but I’ve never quite been able to justify having the constant bombardment of external information while working which makes use problematic.

It seems obvious that Snackr is too distracting to be allowed in the workplace and would only appeal to information junkies like bloggers and journalists, but the more I use it the more inclined I am to believe there’s some real value here when the right context is applied.

Lots of people less obvious than bloggers and journalists are highly dependent on the free flow of information. For instance most managers at their core are communicators responsible for managing the constructive flow of information and instruction between members of their team and the company at large. Imagine a software development company where the developers are microblogging their work related activities and managers are posting their teams progress, objectives and roadblocks. To the manager the information flow is time and context sensitive which is why an almost real time ticker approach makes sense (much as a stock ticker makes sense to a broker).

It’s long been predicted that RSS would replace email, but for non-geeks its always been a little fuzzy why and how this would happen. I see the blogging, microblogging, lifestreaming as hyperlocal trends precipitating the shift. It’s clear that most of our conversations have historical value and the aggregation and public (heavily scoped) availability of these conversations can be of enormous value when delivered effectively to the appropriate audience.

Obviously there are privacy concerns, but the difference between public / private has been rapidly disappearing as the world has gotten smaller and flatter. Planes, trains, automobiles, radio, television, cell phones, cell phone cameras, email, IM, etc. have increasingly given us the ability to view and invade what was once personal. We’re not going to put this genie back into the bottle. Instead the race is on to see how we can effectively channel the technology and corresponding cultural shifts. Through that lens a hyperlocal Snackr seems very intriguing indeed.