Given that this is TechCrunchIT’s first week, I suppose I’m willing to cut Steve and Nik some slack as they define the scope of what they want to cover. That is, whether they intend to provide news and tactical analysis of existing “products and companies in the Enterprise Technology space” or push things out further and start a discussion on how some of the new consumer apps and mashups will be brought into the enterprise. Personally, I’m more interested in the latter.

You asked, “Can you give me an example of these feeds that the software would aggregate?”

Sure:

* Most if not all wiki software these days provides an RSS feed of changes. I don’t have adoption stats, but I would certainly think firms outside of Silicon Valley are recognizing the value of the wiki in knowledge capture and collaboration.

* Internal blogs maintained by individuals and teams are a great way to capture project status, keep in sync with team members, and support remote employees. These blogs, of course, provide RSS feeds.

* Providers of document management systems, bug tracking systems, help desk systems, customer service applications, and other knowledge capture applications have certainly recognized the value in providing feeds as a way to distribute information about updates. If they’re not already providing these feeds, I suspect they will be in the next version or two.

There’s also the opportunity to tie all this data together with numerical feeds like vehicle / shippment geolocation data and generate mapping and charting mashups. I’m not sure what feeds logistics services provide, but I suspect they’re coming shortly.

I’d certainly agree with you that adoption of these technologies isn’t moving as quickly as some of us would like, but to some extent I think there’s a chicken-and-the-egg issue: roll-out of these sorts of feeds and feed tech may be slow until employees have systems that can aggregate the infromation, allow an individual to filter by topic or author, and otherwise slice and dice the information the way systems like FriendFeed can.

“How is that not an emerging technology for the enterprise?

Just because an existing technology could be applied to the enterprise market does not make that technology enterprise software.

I read through the post and don’t see any connection made to a business applications. Consumer and enterprise markets are very different, adoption is slow.

You also mentioned feeds. Can you give me an example of these feeds that the software would aggregate?

The first step would be wide-spread adoption of intranets with RSS, web based communication software with APIs, and other content like project management updates with these enterprises. But unfortunately those technologies are not yet common outside of silicon valley. Especially multiple ones to be aggregated.

I’d argue there is a need for the technologies I listed. But right now its too early to say there is a need for a service to aggregate content that is hardly there.

*Hopefully I’m not coming off as an arrogant c-list commenter*

Couldn’t have said it better, and didn’t.

If you use FF for a while, I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the same service in your company (either installed internally or hosted with the appropriate authentication and authorization features added) aggregating all the feeds from everyone in your workgroup, department, or business. It’s lighter weight than email, provides a public feed similar to an intranet home page, facilitates quick conversations, and is globally accessible. How is that not an emerging technology for the enterprise?

Yes they did, and in fact Bret Taylor went a little further in a video conversation we had at Supernova: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/18/liveblogging-supernova-liquid-conversations-panel/

I’m confident this is forthcoming, and expect that these talented folks will indeed jump through these hoops in a relative nano-second.

“TCIT is dedicated to obsessively profiling products and companies in the Enterprise Technology space. TCIT aims to promote an understanding of emerging and existing Enterprise technologies and to analyze their commercial, social, and consumer impacts.”