A few weeks back, I attended a talk by Rodney Brooks (from the CS and AI Lab at MIT). As I blogged at the time, his talk centred around the idea of exponentials as key to future research directions (of which Moore’s law is almost certainly the best known). Examples he showcased included the disk capacity of an iPod (roughly doubling every year for a given price point) and the number of transistors in the world.

Why I bring this up is I’ve just read a story that TechCrunch is reporting on the recently released Feedburner statistics that show the growth of Feedburner subscribers and managed feeds over the last 18 months. Both show clearly exponential trends – the number of feed subscribers appears to be doubling about every two months (or even faster in some cases)! The number of managed feeds has increased by more than an order of magnitude over the past year.

If we consider these Feedburner stats as a proxy for RSS feeds in general (which may or may not be valid – anyone have any thoughts on the matter?), it’s interesting to think about what the effects will be of massive RSS overload in the not too distant future. What kinds of new opportunities will all those feeds open up? What will be possible which isn’t possible now? I imagine tailored summarisation and synthesis of RSS feeds is only likely to be getting a lot more attention in the future.