Digital Deliverance: Why the Web Will Kill RSS

Re: Why the Web Will Kill RSS

I’m in the middle of the road. I think email still has legs, but once I started using NewsGator I immediately saw a better future. Subscribing to a feed is trivially easy – you don’t have to input an email address, type in a URL or anything. Just right-click the XML icon and you’r done. It will soon get even easier because the aggreagtor community is close to agreeing on a subscription standard (it will be very similar to a mailto: link). From the publisher’s side, compare that to hooking up an opt-in form, confirming subscriptions etc.

I find that more and more I wish all sites had RSS feeds so I could passively “keep in touch” with them. I do that not because I am the site’s “biggest fan” but rather the opposite – I’m interested in what they offer, but not interested enough to fill out a form and risk being spammed later.

NewsGator only works with Outlook, but other email client developers would be foolish not to add the same functionality. AOL now offers blogs – I suspect an integrated RSS aggregator is not far behind. Ditto Yahoo and Hotmail (check out Oddpost for a preview of the future). Microsoft has to be thinking of buying NewsGator – several bloggers who work for Microsoft have mentioned it as a great tool. Not just for blog feeds – RSS is useful for things like getting notices from source code management tools.

And that is why RSS will continue to gain traction – it can be extended a million different ways in much the same way a browser can be extended via plugins. Email clients are devolving because of viruses – the new Outlook turns off HTML by default. Meanwhile, RSS is evolving to support more complex concepts such as delivery of mp3s and other rich media. When’s the last time you advised a publisher to send an attachment to its list? For that matter, when’s the last time you saw something truly new with email?

Much like the browser in 1994-1999, all the innovation right now is in RSS. Maybe it won’t replace email per se, but neither did email replace direct mail. An awful lot of marketers and publishers are glad they came to the email game early before the riff raff overwhelmed the medium. Likewise, now is the time to join the RSS revolution.

And a worm is much less likely to be spread by RSS. (I’d say it’s impossible, but never say never…)

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