RSS Will Not Replace Email ?

Over the years technology has provided us with more options for
sending and receiving content over the internet. One of the newest is a
delivery system called Real Simple Syndication or "RSS".
Definition:
RSS
is a format for delivering news and other content through a syndication
channel. The most common sites that publish RSS feeds still include
major news organizations whose information is broken into different
stories and can be delivered to recipients once published.
This
delivery concept has also been adopted by other non-news related sites
such as the blogging community who publish posts (similar to news
stories) and allow other people to subscribe through RSS to receive
their blog posts automatically.
RSS Usage Rates:
RSS
has been in use since 1999 but still hasn't been adopted by the mass
Internet community. According to an October 2005 White Paper published
by Yahoo, "Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of
users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS."
[http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf]
A publisher looking to distribute their content can't rely on just RSS alone.
Tools to Read RSS:
To
read an RSS feed you need news aggregator software to capture, read and
store all the content that is delivered through RSS. There are many
popular aggregators on the market today, many of which are free of
charge.
Two popular types of aggregators are web based
readers (Bloglines) or a desktop reader (SharpReader). The web based
reader is an online free service that you login and can subscribe, read
and manage all your RSS feeds. The desktop software is similar in
features to its online counterpart but is installed and runs on your
computer.
Will RSS Replace Email?
I'd
be willing to wager that anyone reading this article today checked
their email, in fact going a bit further I bet you not only checked
your email but also replied to some of it as well. Will RSS replace
email? - I think we can collectively say -- no, email is far to
important but the beauty of email is that you can marry the two
technologies together to deliver information that subscribers want, in
the format they want...
Sean Cohen, Director of Client Relations
& Development of Newtown, PA based AWeber Communications, Inc. an
opt-in email service provider. Learn how you can incorporate RSS and
email automatically with our newest feature -- Feed Broadcaster.

Learn how you can incorporate RSS and email automatically with our newest feature -- Feed Broadcaster.

 * Article by Sean Cohen. *