We’ve not had a techy fight in ages thanks to all the women having their own fights, so lets go!
Michele points to Tom O’Leary’s quite defensive stand on email and why RSS is not the wunderkind it is billed to be.
Tom lists reasons where RSS falls down and where email is better. I’ve added some comments of my own:
* You can’t segment an audience with RSS for a demographically-designed message without investing in a complex backoffice utility.
The more you want a custom designed and delivered message, the more it is going to be complex to design/run. That goes for everything. However for an end-user it doesn’t have to be complex whatsoever. The magic to make it simple to use is the job of a professional software house. Is this something like Nooked does?
* You can’t securely send passwords, key codes or recipient-specific information with RSS
There is such as thing as Secure RSS that can in fact do this and much more.
* You can’t effectively align images in a message with RSS.
This just boils down to the definition of effective. Tis an XML feed after all. Style information could in fact be included.
* You can’t use HTML design effectively with RSS.
See above.
* You can’t personalize an RSS feed with custom content.
Nooked again? Well you could in fact by having an rss feed with a unique session id added to it everytime the feed subscription page is loaded. I’m not a coder and this seems obvious to me.
RSS will in my view be good for email and make email more enjoyable. Newsletters and all these one-way communications that make up so much of our inboxes will be gone and we can get on with communicating with people and not automated shite that streams in.
I don’t think there’s any reason to think that email will die as a result of RSS but it will be repositioned certainly. Anyone that says that RSS will kill email is obviously a bit dim. However, if people were to say RSS would replaced the one way delivery of information to someone that email was previously used to do this, then that’s quite brought. The new mailclients will have RSS integration built in and people will prefer to click, subscribe, click unsubscribe.
Email is fine for communicating but absolutely crap for attention. Anyone can mail you in whatever volumes they want and you have to sort it. Sure spam filters and all that will look after some, but it is an arms race between the spammers and the filter makers. RSS means you say “I will allow such a person to get my attention” and if you get bored of them. Click. Gone. No chance of getting hit with new sneaky feeds or your details being sold on someone else delivers a feed to you.
