Why RSS has not supplanted email...

Fred Wilson nails it. Because RSS still isn't "brain dead simple." For non-geeks it's still too confusing to set up an RSS newsreader, to find - or aggregate - all the feeds you're interested in, to subscribe, etc.

The RSS vs. email discussion erupted again in response to the announcement several days ago that Yahoo and AOL will start charging senders 1/4 of a cent to a penny per message delivered. The idea is that the email or e-newsletter marketers who pay this premium will be guaranteed that their messages will reach intended recipients' inboxes.

Read Tris Hussey and Steve Rubel on the topic of the end of cost-effective email marketing. Read Dave Winer on why RSS is hard to use and Stowe Boyd on Reads, Not Feeds.

Oh, and don't misunderstand. RSS is in many ways a better solution for dispensing and receiving information online. But despite the proposed postage for email marketers, email isn't dead yet.

Comments

[Mordechai (Morty) Schiller]

RSS is not only hard to understand... it's downright clunky to use.

Bloglines is an excellent tool... to organize my clutter. Now I can find all the blogs I don't have time to read in one place! (217 feeds at last count.)

The best use I find for RSS is to get notified in Thunderbird when someone comments on my blog... and to let people subcribe to my blog posts by good old email, with FeedBlitz.

And, of course, the BlogWrite for CEO's LiveLine Bookmark on my toolbar!

[Jesse Thomas]

I really enojoyed todays roundtable.

check my blogs.

http://www.jess3.com
http://www.bentleysondubs.com

stay in touch if you want.

// jesse

[Debbie Weil]

Thanks Jesse. It was a pleasure. Whoa... just checked your blogs. They're probably not "corporate proof" but I love the design!

Jesse is referring to the D.C.-based Grassroots Roundtable that Kevin Holland (who blogs at http://www.associationinc.com/blog/) and I spoke at today in a session at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. http://www.grassrootsroundtable.com/

A great group. If you're "outside the beltway" (as we call it here in Washington DC) you might not have an appreciation for all the cool stuff that goes on here with trade associations and advocacy groups.

[Jordan]

Hi Debbie,

Just found you today.
I recently convinced our CEO to start blogging, and our metrics(examined daily)show that our email newsletter is still an order of magnitude more popular than our RSS feed.

People are creatures of habit, it seems, and those of us blogging can still be called early adopters. We've just added a feature (Blogarithm) that allows people to subscribe to the feed via email, until they discover RSS on their own terms. Time will tell how well it works.

I love RSS for it's user-driven accessibility, but until it duplicates the results of email marketing, we'll all have to be two-trick ponies, as it were. (For what it's worth, we do permission-based mails only, no spam. Ever.)

-Jordan

[Charles]

"I recently convinced our CEO to start blogging, and our metrics(examined daily)show that our email newsletter is still an order of magnitude more popular than our RSS feed."

And how much longer has your CEO's email newsletter been going? What a false analogy you've drawn there.

RSS has enormous potential, and as a journalist and editor I know that it's much better for taking the pulse of what's going on, and finding interesting stories hidden away in backwaters. Email is particular, but for me the press releases I get by email are mostly just noise, not signal.

Bloglines, yes, is pretty hopeless - Technorati is miles better.

As for "RSS is too clunky" - well, wait for Windows Vista with autodiscovery of feeds and RSS built into the system throughout. That will be interesting. Firefox of course already does autodiscovery, as does Apple's Safari; subscribing is a matter of clicking an icon.

The clunkiness might be in the content, but that's not the fault of RSS.