17 Apr, 2004
Miscellaneous
Share

RSS vs. Mail Subscriptions

Larry Seltzer from Ziff Davis pon­dered what the value of RSS is, over email. Here's a rejoin­der with some thoughts.

Larry Seltzer posed a ques­tion that had egged me for a while about a year or so ago: Isn't RSS a "Really Silly Stan­dard"? He won­dered if RSS is any bet­ter than mail subscriptions.

I am increas­ingly con­vinced that RSS is not a silly stan­dard. While you surely won't see me writ­ing odes to it, I have found that my atti­tudes toward infor­ma­tion aggre­ga­tion have been quite fun­da­men­tally altered ever since I started using News­ga­tor with my Out­look. Get­ting my sub­scrip­tions in RSS has some pretty use­ful advan­tages over email sub­scrip­tions. Some thoughts below:

  1. As a user, the MOST impor­tant fea­ture is that all my entries are struc­tured in the same for­mat, so my view of all the infor­ma­tion is the same. No scan­ning con­vo­luted nav­i­ga­tional menus or per­func­tory "Hi there" pleasantries.
  2. It's a PULL strat­egy which gives read­ers the con­trol. I can get new con­tent from a defined source any­time. With email as well, I could choose my sub­scrip­tions to be daily, weekly etc., but what if I want to tem­porar­ily change the tim­ing (if I am, say, on a vaca­tion)? I have to indi­vid­u­ally go to each mail­ing list's web­site and change those fre­quency set­tings. With RSS, it's a sim­ple right-click away in my Out­look and I can con­trol all my sub­scrip­tions in a sin­gle click.
  3. I don't have to worry about ads, tables, all that gunk that usu­ally comes out with email sub­scrip­tions. (And yes, the spam, as you men­tioned, because the sender has no idea who I am)
  4. From the SENDER's per­spec­tive, it is much more effi­cient to man­age con­tent with RSS, as emails don't need to be designed. The con­tent is pretty much pulled from the DB at any­time, with­out any dec­o­ra­tional fuss.
  5. RSS is a *struc­tured* *for­mat*. This means that a rel­a­tively advanced user (who is com­fort­able with cod­ing) can effec­tively DESIGN his own RSS feed, which could pull RSS from dif­fer­ent sources, cat­e­go­rize them, and then allow him to get only HIS feed from HIS server. This is just not prac­ti­cal with email, imag­ine all the com­plex­i­ties involved in scan­ning through dif­fer­ent mail­ing lists!

Indeed, if one puts his head to it, RSS turns out to be a very sim­ple and some­what under­whelm­ing imple­men­ta­tion of XML. But I am begin­ning to believe that most ele­gance is actu­ally rather simple.

But even from a prag­matic point of view, like it or not, it is now a stan­dard embraced by many peo­ple around the world so it makes all the sense to have my con­tent avail­able in that for­mat if I want eyeballs

Can some­thing bet­ter come up in the future? Sure, some­thing always does. For instance, RSS itself may be rein­car­nated (and the discussion/debate is still on, as usual, which is a GoodThing) or we may have entirely new approaches like Atom (Six Apart has a pretty inter­est­ing thought­piece com­par­ing it with RSS.)

In the mean­time, this silly stan­dard is actu­ally quite a life saver for me as I don't have to visit 1200 web­sites sim­ply to man­age my mail sub­scrip­tions (for most of which I don't recall what pass­word I used!)

(Adden­dum: There are some inter­est­ing obser­va­tions on RSS ver­sus email com­par­isons here as well.)

TOPICS

6 comments
Submit yours
  1. Dave Englund says: Apr 18, 20048:31 am

    I agree that RSS is a valu­able new addi­tion to the infor­ma­tion brows­ing expe­ri­ence. But why would you use an Outlook-based news­reader (News­gater) that pulls con­tent down to fill up your local machine's hard drive, when you could "read it and leave it" all on the Net by using a FREE online reader such as Bloglines?

    Bas­cially, I rarely surf like I used to. I surf via my news­reader. Its a much quicker way to sort through online con­tent and zero in on what I'm really inter­ested in.

    Now if we can just get more RSS feeds!!

  2. sniptools says: Apr 18, 200410:49 am

    Thanks Dave. Inter­est­ing thought, but I pre­fer get­ting my feeds in Out­look because:

    (1) The inter­face is famil­iar. I am used to skim­ming through sub­jects and see­ing the "Pre­view" of con­tent only if I wish.

    (2) I pull the con­tent with one click, and it goes into the fold­ers that *I* have designated.

    (3) If I like an arti­cle, it is a bit eas­ier for me to store than to copy paste from a web­site, as it is already in there.

    (4) You can POST from the same inter­face as well, and News­ga­tor has some ancil­lary fea­tures such as "tidy­ing" your HTML if you use that in your post.

    (5) Since it is in Out­look as fold­ers, I can avail of all the usual func­tions like search­ing, archiv­ing etc. Which is super cool.

    (6) Above all, it does not nec­es­sar­ily eat up my hard disk because, just like email, I clear up my mail boxes for feeds too.

    It's sub­jec­tive I guess, but above are a few rea­sons why I am accus­tomed to news­ga­tor (or feeddemon).

    –Shanx

  3. Harold Check says: Apr 18, 200411:15 am

    I've been think­ing about this a lot lately. RSS keeps the infor­ma­tion flow­ing at high rate. Now we need read­ers that don't just fetch the data and dis­play it pret­tily. We need read­ers that allow us to pri­or­i­tize, orga­nize, archive, search, for­ward, link, etc. etc. I find that high-priority vs. low-priority, business-priority vs. personal-priority are com­mon dichotomies in my own RSS read­ing. I'd love an RSS reader that knows to "slow down" at a cer­tain point in the day. Maybe start polling my business-related feeds a lit­tle less fre­quently when it's time for me to go cook dinner.…

  4. Ulrich Schwanitz says: Jun 09, 20049:30 pm

    If you pre­fer RSS in eMail over a sep­a­rate reader, check out
    IzyNews — http://izynews.com

    It is plat­form– and application-independent (not restricted to Out­look) and han­dles all sched­ul­ing and aggre­ga­tion for you.

    ——

    IzyNews is a new way of receiv­ing news and other RSS feeds in our eMail appli­ca­tion. With IzyNews, you can sub­scribe to thou­sands of weblogs and pro­fes­sion­ally syn­di­cated head­lines feeds for deliv­ery right into your eMail application.

    Com­pressed infor­ma­tion for speed-reading, no time-consuming surf­ing.
    Auto­mat­i­cally deliv­ered to your eMail, no pop-ups or virusses, and
    100% spam-free. Guaranteed.

    IzyNews is made to work with a broad vari­ety of pop­u­lar eMail appli­ca­tions, such as
    Out­look Express, Out­look, Pocket PC Inbox, Mozilla, Thun­der­bird, Eudora, Entourage, Mul­berry any others

    IzyNews is an online ser­vice and not yet another appli­ca­tion. It lever­ages less com­monly used fea­tures of your eMail and does not require a down­load or instal­la­tion. It is com­pat­i­ble with any com­puter system.

    IzyNews works across com­puter bound­aries and gives you the same view, whether you are at home, at work or on the road. No more syn­chro­niz­ing the same items mul­ti­ple times.

  5. mangle says: Jul 16, 200410:13 pm

    very thought­ful piece. i read some­thing use­ful here too -
    http://rentzsch.com/notes/rssVersusListServers

  6. Hipp says: Feb 19, 200511:53 am

    Thanks for all. Great!

Submit comment

© 2010 —Sniptools. All Rights Reserved.