Just this week I was talking with some colleagues about Atom and its applicability to representing content types other than blog entries and news articles and at the same time a query came over the atom syntax mailing list asking about feeds of non-blog content for use in mashups. Aside from mashups being one of the sexiest application development paradigms out there today, I’m happy to have them on the scene because they represent a class of use completely distinct from the first consumers of feeds. The original consumer of feeds was the human. Sure, there was a program that humans used to help parse the feed (the feed reader) but that parsing was generally the only automation that sat between the feed and the human. So, of course, the type of information in that feed was directly targeted at the human.

• GData: a feed including items found with the search term rest web service. (gdata API info)
• Flickr: an atom feed of publicly available photos – you would typically constrain the feed with a targeted query (flickr services info)

And moving a bit further into the realm of application consumers of feeds, OpenDS offers an Atom feed over the contents in the directory server.Momentum is definitely building.