Thursday, June 30, 2005
Why do we need mailing lists in the age of RSS?
Paul Kedrosky received an phishing email that asked him to click through and unsubscribe from a magazine's mailing list.
In this age of RSS feeds, why cant the banks and similar institutions starting generating RSS feeds and have people subscribe to it. There is no sign-up or sign-out process. The very act of subscribing to a feed becomes the sign-up process. For any update or marketing material they want to send out (what else do they send out in their mailing lists anyway), they put it in the feed. If you dont like their feed, you just hit delete remove it from your feed aggregator or reader. No "you will be removed in 48-76 hours from this list" messages. Its a win-win situation for everyone.
In this age of RSS feeds, why cant the banks and similar institutions starting generating RSS feeds and have people subscribe to it. There is no sign-up or sign-out process. The very act of subscribing to a feed becomes the sign-up process. For any update or marketing material they want to send out (what else do they send out in their mailing lists anyway), they put it in the feed. If you dont like their feed, you just hit delete remove it from your feed aggregator or reader. No "you will be removed in 48-76 hours from this list" messages. Its a win-win situation for everyone.
Copyright Anand Jain 2004, 2005. All rights
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