E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS 244
prostoalex writes "The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS, the InternetNews.com article says. Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome is quoted saying that people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer. This short article on About.com also argues for the RSS as preferred format for newsletters, site headlines and all sorts of updates that were e-mailed to customers before."
I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsgroups (Score:5, Insightful)
No content, but wants control (Score:4, Insightful)
As for RSS, what are they proposing? Will they have a web site that aggragates for us? No thanks - I don't want to see unrelated advertising, nor do I want to have to put up with their quirks or have their layout and styling applied to everything I subscribe to. Netscape tried this with their portal, and I didn't find it very compelling. Alternatively, are they going to make us install a client application that aggragates? That will face some resistance too, as well as the normal platform specific issues. MSFT tried this with IE4 - it was gone by IE5. I guess not enough people signed up to the channels.
I think email is still the best medium, and will remain so for many years. Portals are dead, and that's all an online RSS aggregator will be.
damn spammers ruining everything (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people actually use RSS Aggregators? (Score:4, Insightful)
How does RSS scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I do question the ability of RSS to scale. Think of a scenario where millions of users need to poll hundreds of thousands of sources to check for updates on the feeds. How much unnecessary load does this pose to the network and servers? Is RSS really the best way to do it? Wouldn't we be better off with web based forums, or moderated usenet newsgroups? Or yet, extending email with the concept of task-oriented e-mail addresses -- which accept content coming from a defined set of servers only?
In principle, push methods seem a lot more efficient for this kind of content distribution.
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen some of the opt-in lists. I've been on a few, despite not having opted in.
If you tell me that there are 1.7 million people in the entire world willing to be put on an opt-in advertising list, I call bullshit. The "Opt-in" lists as they exist now get subscribers by surreptitiousness (putting the "you will be added" on page 43 of a contest agreement form), deceit ("By not failing to have clicked in the position indicated, you are agreeing to not rescind the option to be excluded from..."), and flat out fraud (adding people who didn't ask for it, and claiming they did).
That's how opt-in lists work. If you've got 1.7 million people on one list, then that's how you work, and that makes you a spammer.
Unclear on RSS, explanation? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people want to buy or download yet ANOTHER program for their communication needs? We already have AIM, MSN, ICQ, YIM,IRC, five different proprietary video clients, and newsreaders. If using a web browser, who wants to visit twenty different websites to read their mailing lists(Yahoo Groups is bad enough isn't it?) On top of that, email still must be dealt with.
I can understand the benefits of it I think: Locked down feeds presenting a huge hurdle for spammers, XML for flexible programming, and a download as you go structure(like newsgroups).
I like email lists the way they are personally. I find spam to be easily identifiable so I don't lose tons of messages like the article mentions. I don't know if I'd go for it if it's like blogs. Email lists can get off topic, but blogs seem like they're always rambling. I've looked at the blogs of the people that belong to mailing lists I'm on, and there's no way they'd ever replace the email list.
Anybody care to give a good explanation about RSS?
RSS Via Jabber (Score:5, Insightful)
You can publish almost anything as a RSS feed, for instance URL's mentioned on an IRC channel.
When combining technologies such as these you can get some real neat stuff happening. Sometime I want to write some scripts using naive bayes to sort out the RSS information I'm interested in vs the stuff I'm not and then have it subscribe to lots of RSS feeds
A combination of methods (Score:5, Insightful)
I run a website (The View From The Ground [viewfromtheground.com]) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.
We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.
While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.
Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.
Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.
This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.
The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.
Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, if N=1 it's all good. Then either you get 200 bytes or 200 bytes + size of <item> + surrounding RSS elements. Not too many RSS files have been that small from what I've seen, but it would certainly make it almost push-like, which I still see as the god-like ideal.
I guess it comes down to the question, do you use mail routing to deliver your mail straight to your house, or do you use fetchmail from the house? If you perfer fetchmail, then you probably prefer RSS. If you would prefer to have it routed straight there, then use a method which routes it without having to be prodded every few minutes.
Re:Unclear on RSS, explanation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Listservs will never die (Score:5, Insightful)
People just don't subscribe to email newsletters? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I check my email, it's nice to know that everything that comes in (short of spam) is targeted specifically at me. The newsletters, however useful and informative, tend to be lengthy and not the sort of thing I often have time to read when I'm trying to read and reply to my personal emails.
I realize the standard answer people give is to set up mailbox rules so the newsletters get tossed into their own folders. Sure, I can do that (and have often done so), but then I end up with a huge folder filled with overwhelming amounts of text to sift through. If I don't get time to read them for a few weeks, a lot of it ends up getting mass deleted. (It's not usually important enough to justify a marathon reading session to try to catch up with all the back messages piled up in there.)
I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.
There is no push (Score:4, Insightful)
RSS must put a lot less load on the network than me checking out the CNN web page 2 or 3 times a day to see what's going on.
Re:I gave up mail lists for forums (Score:4, Insightful)
Email lists were never a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
RSS is a great idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
RSS is a relatively new creation, especially in terms of popularity and I think there are a large number of geeks like myself that will definitely like being able to pull the few newsletters or lists we like. Especially if they pull headlines and still make you request delivery or actually visit a web site.
I personally have loved watching readers (aggregators) develop and mature, as well as more sites coming online with content for them. I think this is certainly one of the things to watch as it is morphing the way we use the web.
Kind of like the evolution of blog style web sites that report news and commentary, so I don't have to hit the estimated 50 billion hardware review sites each day just to see what they have been playing with. Used with a
And yes, if it is popular Microsoft will probably make a stand alone reader or more likely bundle it with IE or Outlook Express.
Re:Realization at last? (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, the only push technology that comes off the top of my head right now is spam.
Re:There is no push (Score:3, Insightful)
The other difference (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, there is a real future in RSS for genuine advertisers selling desirable product. People like informative, relevant, targetted adverts, especially in pull media (thus not having to put up with intrusive marketing databases). After all, what else is the typical opensource app's web site but informative, useful brochureware?
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk [disobey.com], or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire [ranchero.com]. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.
Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.
So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?
Re:No content, but wants control (Score:3, Insightful)
If you do not use this method, you're a spammer. If you question that, please answer how you deal with some pissant lowlife signing up tens, hundreds, or thousands of random email addresses using your form. I don't care what sort of magic TOS/AUP, disclaimer, or privacy you have: if third parties can add email addresses to your lists without confirmation, then YOU ARE A SPAMMER.
What Are you Talking About? (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyone remember Pointcast? (Score:3, Insightful)
Stating the Obvious: (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya know, I remember in the early days when there was no WWW, and listservs were considered a killer app. It's no different today, many people want an internet connection just to access and interact on specialized lists. Let us hope that this never goes away. The internet is not designed for us to all subscribe to the same RSS feeds, the internet is designed for us to talk to EACH OTHER.
Distributed forums. (Score:2, Insightful)
And for all the talk about distributed, decentralized forums, Usenet seems to be it. Everything else, including this one, sit on a single service at more-or-less a single location.
RSS is in many ways very useful, but seems to pull down an unnecessary amount of useless information: the same lists get pulled whether or not they've been pulled before and whether or not they've been read before. A single UDP packet could be used for polling, it might be big enough to hold some kind of signature and state information. Could something be modeled (however vaguely) on how NTP spreads time data?
Re:Stating the Obvious: (Score:5, Insightful)
Email lists are the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
Putting up web pages may be easy and cheap enough to be an option for everybody, but it doesn't provide the same level of interactivity as a mailing list can. A world in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer is not the same thing as a world in which everyone can be an equal participant. The latter is what we have, where the former is what replacing mailing lists with RSS feeds would give us in even the best case.
Mailing lists are delivered to the users' own mailboxes, at which point their data becomes unavailable only when the recipients decide to delete it. Web pages, on the other hand, are stored on central servers and are thus vulnerable not only to network outages but to gratuitous changes made server-side by webmasters, as well as other sorts of problems. For certain types of content (advertising newsletters would be a good example), this is not a meaningful limitation because the content itself is worthless if it's out of date...but that does not describe the sum total of discussion on mailing lists, and it does not make sense to introduce such unnecessary vulnerabilities.
RSS is good for what it's designed for...but please let's not try to throw away a working technology and substitute a kludged one in its place.
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
If you install software, and it doesn't work like you want it to, why don't you fix it, then?
Disadvantages of email (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
That's not necessarily the issue. Instead, I think, lots of people just don't want to have to deal with separating the newsletter they want from the spam they don't want. And lots of others might be afraid their email address will leak (be sold) to a spammer. Unique mailbox addresses to sign up with might help, but most people don't have these nor know how to create them.
In some cases, signups to legitimate newsletters or mailing lists are failing because they are hosted by providers that have had, or maybe still have, spammers operating, and some ISPs are blocking them. Other disadvantages of email include the hassle of having to do a confirmation cycle (switch to the mail program) to sign up.
RSS seems like an interesting solution, but it's basically a one way feed although you can hyperlink to a web submission form if the newsletter provides two-way communication. Many have suggested NNTP (running isolated from the global USENET) for the more discussion oriented mailing lists. And another option is for the mailing list operator to host the mailboxes (stored shared) with access via IMAP. Perhaps integrating all of these into a web browser will make it all work better. Oh wait...
Re:Misbehaving caching proxies (Score:2, Insightful)
...and probably doesn't cache .rdf, .rss, .asp, or .php files (since they're dynamic), one of which is the likely extension of your newsfeed. If you are stuck with AOL, and you notice that it is caching dynamic content, your most obvious recourse is to choose an ISP that doesn't do so.