Attensa

In 2007 or so, Attensa created an RSS server for enterprise clients. The next big thing, some thought, was RSS, but not as a transport protocol. Instead, some saw it as a solution to email. RSS, along with Atom, was a way to aggregate and read content from many places and aggregate and prioritize information from various parts of a corporation. If we could pull data from anywhere, and know what was relevant to the reader, then email would be a thing of the past. How cool would that be?

With an Outlook plugin, the Attensa server, and lots of money, the enterprise could reduce the information clutter, and only relevant things would appear in a user's inbox. It was a pretty remarkable idea, and the technology behind it was one of attention, knowing what was important to readers by tracking their habits, then prioritizing that information at the top of a feed. Of course, we all know that, as an idea, it never went anywhere. There is nothing available today that learns a user's habits, tracks them across applications and websites, and prioritizes what the system, or in our case, the boss, wants them to see or read. Yet imagine if there was...

Anyway, I worked in marketing as a technical marketer. My job was building the campaigns to sell RSS servers and Outlook plugins, and we did some really creative things. I also had a chance to work on the application UI, what there was of it, and explore the nascent concept of machine learning for the first time.

It was also the time of Web 2.0 when everything was shiny and round, like the buttons in Windows XP. A lot was happening, and we were just part of some wholesale change in how websites are built and maintained. We had a small play with RSS and attention, but the bigger picture was "develop to standards, not browsers," and data management. CMSs were becoming real and feature-rich. WordPress was the right thing at the right time, and platforms like Drupal were becoming enterprise tools.

Everyone was experimenting with something, and not everything was successful. We went all in on RSS, only to find it was not the future of attention. The future was elsewhere, and the morality of what attention became in terms of algorithms and privacy and tracking is indisputably negative, but, for a moment, many thought it would be a good thing. On the other hand, content management systems turned into a buzzword of their own, "content as a service," and some of us would go on to see the CMS become better than anything we had at the time. Then the economy collapsed, and we were all out of work.