At the 2002 Emerging Technology Conference, Rohit Khare gave an influential talk on an architecture he called application layer internetworking (ALIN). Five years later that thinking has evolved, and now he's describing syndication-oriented architecture (SynOA). The same idea of event routing is at the core of both ALIN and SynOA. With ALIN, messages are SOAP packets that travel between applications. With SynOA's, messages are items in RSS or Atom feeds that travel among applications, people, or both.

ALIN was born in the enterprise and remains there, whereas SynOA was born on the open web and is now creeping into the enterprise. To understand why, just consider Facebook. It is a deeply syndication-oriented application. Although Facebook users never have to think about it in these terms, they are constantly publishing events onto a syndication bus while at the same time subscribing to aggregated feeds published by their friends. As a result, they're effortlessly yet comprehensively aware of a large number of summarized event streams. Rohit Khare thinks that syndication-oriented architecture will enable business users to achieve that same kind of awareness.