Email is Dead. Long Live RSS. Skim the Internet.

Posted: June 8th, 2007 | Author: Ben | Filed under: Web Development |

Yesterday, Ben Cooper, one of the other guys on the digital team here at Host gave a presentation about RSS to the company. My company is in advertising, and despite the people I work with all being very bright it doesn’t mean they’re familiar with any Internet technologies other than email, HTML and Flash.

To be honest I don’t have much user experience with RSS. I’ve created RSS XML pages that are dynamically created through a CMS and I’ve got the Happiness and Cyanide comic feeding through to my iGoogle page. So it was also an education for me too. I don’t know much about FeedBurner or Aggregators. I admit, I’m a bit behind.

Ben explained everything very well, and actually got me on-side: I went into the talk with the idea that email is the standard way a website reaches out to its audience, and will continue to be the standard for a long time. Back in the UK I received my Amazon newsletter that was completely customised to the things Amazon told me I needed to buy because I’d like them. In a nutshell, I felt that you can customise an email right down to the individual preferences of the recipient, and then push it out to your users. What I found out is that as a user, once you’re familiar with RSS you educate yourself to control the information you read.

I’m a developer, so I’ve had to send out newsletters before to thousands of subscribers using various tools (at my previous agency we used de-mailer, a mass mailing application built by my then-colleague Matt Knight). Sending emails is far cheaper than sending out pamphlets and catalogues through the letterbox, but it still costs something. RSS feeds can be created and subscribed to at absolutely zero cost.

Emails highlight a point in time when the information contained within them is relevant. You can’t update the words in an email after it’s been sent, and if there’s something incorrect or something missing from the original email you have to weigh up the pros and cons of inundating your subscribers’ inboxes with a follow-up email, that might tempt them to unsubscribe from your newsletter mail-outs entirely. You can correct or add to an RSS feed at any point, and all your subscribers will see the updates.

There are drawbacks to RSS. Well, two of them that stand out to me.

First of all the penetration of the technology is still mostly geek-central. RSS features exist on eBay and the BBC news website, but that doesn’t mean my mum knows what RSS is. My mum uses email, MSN Messenger and will book her holidays online, but hasn’t heard of Really Simple Syndication, and the words ‘really simple syndication’ don’t exactly make it any clearer. IE7 and of course FireFox support RSS (although IE7 doesn’t support secure RSS - so can’t deliver private content, which means things like having an RSS feed of your new Gmail emails isn’t possible). The support of mainstream software is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t mean the general Internet population is aware of it.

Secondly you need to have content to support the subscription. An email newsletter might be sent out once a quarter, if you didn’t update your RSS feed for 3 straight months you’d have people unsubscribing after seeing the same content on their screens for so long. The advantage email has is that subscribers to a quarterly newsletter will see their email when it’s relevant, and then it will sink to the bottom of their inboxes, forgotten until the next newsletter. If your website can’t support regular content updates, there would be very little point in providing an RSS feed.

In the end, the user has a system where all the information of interest to her is available in one place. There are no spam messages popping up, and in the same vein your messages don’t get sent to the junk folder. Someone might subscribe to 60 or so websites and use their RSS reader to check the updates from all of them. What then happens is interesting. Instead of being overwhelmed by the amount of information available, it’s skimmed, in much the same way as a newspaper is read: you read the headline and possibly the first few words and from that decide if you want to read more.

The user has the power to review content before it’s read. This means the user is driven straight to the content she wants to see: targeted traffic for your site, and a more efficient user experience for your subscribers.

Going back to my opinion before Ben’s talk, if I were in the UK I would still have my Amazon newsletter because it’s a brand I like and a service that’s useful to me. Although if I were to consider the newsletters from Threadless, eBuyer, Busted Tees and eBay all as important as each other; the weight of the information from each wouldn’t get my attention as well as it would if it were formatted in an easy-to-read list such as RSS.

Of course, there is the argument that your website isn’t suitable for an RSS feed since your content isn’t updated frequently enough. Although to counter, one might say that if you don’t update your content you don’t really have much of a website anyway.

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