Email is Dead
01Sep03
This article argues that due to spam, people do not trust email newsletters anymore. RSS, however, being a “pull” mechanism (users only get what they request), enjoys more trust and a brighter future.
For events@stanford, this would seem to be very applicable. Our audience, however, would need an easy way to transition. Have any of you successfully integrated RSS with email programs? How easy/difficult was it?
“E-mail is dead, period,” declares Chris Pirillo, the Internet entrepreneur who distributes about 400,000 e-mail newsletters weekly. “I don’t care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren’t signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer.”
NewsGator ($29) for MS Outlook works exactly like it should. Its blog posting functionality is not so good, but I guess that’s not relevant for people who are just getting info pushed to them (that makes us “event pushers,” I guess).
University of Minnesota is doing the RSS event info thing pretty well. You can subscribe to lists by category or group, which is exactly how it should work. I’d love to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed of my favorite group’s activities, rather than subscribing to their email list.
Providing RSS/iCal service is also a selling point to departments in getting them to transition their existing calendars to E@S. We should definitely push this (no pun intended). Maybe we’re fishing with strawberries on this one, but I’m certainly an RSS convert.
The real question I have is how should each RSS feed be set up? I guess you just need to add to the feed each event as it’s added to the db? Or as it gets close to happening? If you go with the first option, you won’t have a chronological list, but you will feel like you’re hearing about all the new stuff minutes after it gets posted.
How would you want it to work?
I’d say if you subscribe to an RSS feed as you would a group’s email list, then it should update as the event is added–you get the information when the group owner “publishes” it, as a news item.
RSS (and for that matter, email as well) is not the final step in a person’s daily event decisionmaking–it still must be added to the calendar, electronically or manually.
The “as it gets close to happening” could be an interesting addition; but i still think it would not replace my calendar–with RSS there is no looking forward or back to plan attendance, only getting news. But as our system becomes more trusted and reliable, it might get to the point where you would trust a “news item” to tell you what to do next.
With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative from Editor and Publisher.
Any e-mail publisher with a survival instinct should be publishing RSS feeds of the content that it currently e-mails. “It’s only a matter of time before e-mail newsletters go the way of the dinosaur,” warns Pirillo.