Lately I’ve been thinking of whether & how RSS could be a supplement and possible replacement for email marketing, which is getting killed by spam. Right now most RSS aggregators are either independent applications or integrated into the web browser. However, NewsGator integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which IMO makes a lot more sense.
RSS headlines are pretty similar to email in that there is a “from” field (the channel name), and a subject (the item name). Beyond that, the analogy breaks down somewhat because RSS feeds don’t have much of a body, just a description and a link back to the source content. But in the context of Outlook (and probably other email clients), the model can still work because the RSS client could just suck down the content from the link and pass it to the preview pane (which is just an instance of Internet Explorer).