"So, doomsday for RSS then."

I disagree. Yes, I read articles from only an average of six websites, including: Slashdot, Engadget, delicious/popular, cnn.com, and digg.com. However, I decide whether I want to visit the above websites based on my interest in the snippets provided via my Google personalized homepage RSS feeds for each site.

The power of RSS lies in its ability to provide snippets of information from all of the websites that users frequent.

Does it matter that users may only frequent an average of six sites? No, because RSS still works regardless of the number of sites a user monitors.

Perhaps the uses for RSS will change, but I don't believe that web feeds are doomed. In my opinion, RSS feeds are the most convenient way to monitor those six sites that the average user frequents.

Nick, you've got to know that I feel the same. I wouldn't have spent 11 months developing an RSS client if I wasn't sold on the idea ;)

The point I was making is that when people can't imagine how RSS will change their web habits, they're imagining/examining the wrong part of their life.

It's the information that we do/don't get via email that's going to start flowing through RSS - holiday deals, searches, Amazon newsletters, EBay bidding etc. Those are the things that are going to make waves in the mainstream.

The fundamental problem, regardless of the delivery mechanism (email, rss, etc) is filtering through the stuff we don't want, to get to the stuff we do want. Feeds are great, but what if you want to ignore the ubiquitous "Hey here I am drunk at some industry party" post?

Your right in that certain types of content will soon flow via RSS, but how do you manage it? Do I need a single feed each from Amazon and Ebay, or will someone aggregate it for me? But if we ever get to that stage, then surely we will have someone step up to be the worlds first RSS spammer??

Fundamentally, the 6 sites concept, exists because consumers don't look for things unless they need to. RSS does the work for them.

Now all they need to do is find the feed of course!

"Fundamentally, the 6 sites concept, exists because consumers don't look for things unless they need to. RSS does the work for them."

It's not a concept, it's a statistic. Anyway, I believe this statistic is similar to the effect of having 200 channels on your television and only enjoying 2 or 3 channels. As a consumer, I don't have time to wade through 76 million webpages just like I don't have time to watch 200 channels every week. So I pick the websites that I trust and enjoy reading.


And I still don't understand the original post. Why would one want RSS going through e-mail? What is the benefit? RSS would just be spam at that point. The majority of my valuable e-mails are human communications, not consumer offers.

"The fundamental problem, regardless of the delivery mechanism (email, rss, etc) is filtering through the stuff we don't want, to get to the stuff we do want."

That's what Google was made to do. :) Maybe you've touched on a point: perhaps RSS will be used for better searches....

RSS will help to provide better search capability.

I wrote a paper about RDF (http://www.w3.org/RDF/) a few years ago when it was only a book topic. Now RDF is becoming a viable framework and I believe RSS can and does co-exist with RDF to help with communicating data to users and helping with searches. In the future, the web will have more and more semantic capability- it will understand our words and be able to translate into machine communication without the need for a human intermediary.

With the power of the semantic web, a search phrase like "show me all the red cars for sale in London" will actually return every red car in London that is for sale.

Today such a search phrase just works on keywords contained in the search- it's a word matching game. In the future, human language and machine language will translate better, if not seamlessly, so that we can, in effect, ask our computers for information rather than asking our computers to play the word matching game. I believe the power of XML along with frameworks such as RSS and RDF will allow this to happen.

Nick I see now where I made things confusing. My point was not that we will consume RSS via email but vice versa.

My point was that it's not the things that we consume via the web that will move to RSS so much as many of the things we currently consume via email.

The reason it's better suited is that, as I know you know Nick, RSS is anonymous, puts us control of consumption and relieves the publisher of the responsibility of email address management.

Once RSS is consumed and available en-masse I imagine that the average consumer will start subscribing to all sort of specialist feeds including things like flight updates, holiday offers, timetable changes etc. It is simply the most powerful opt-in method of anonymous information consumption.

(uh-oh, can't get past my own captcha. You know you've spent too long working when you start failing Turing tests)

"The fundamental problem, regardless of the delivery mechanism (email, rss, etc) is filtering through the stuff we don't want, to get to the stuff we do want. Feeds are great, but what if you want to ignore the ubiquitous "Hey here I am drunk at some industry party" post?"

Good point. Check out this site: http://feedrinse.com/ which addresses that issue. It allows you to filter the content in your RSS feeds, much like filtering by keyword in e-mail. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks useful.