THINKing

RSS vs. Email: Technology Smackdown

(Photo by tanakawho)

Email is ubiquitous. People understand it and use it despite its problems. Some industry experts say email deliverability is in the 60 percent range. US Airways has a better on-time record than that.

RSS has 100 percent deliverability. But people don’t understand it or use it despite its advantages. In fact, eMarketer estimates that only about 20 percent of consumers use RSS. Peter Lenkfi has a good article on this topic today at SiteProNews. Lenkfi says – and I agree – that what we are missing is a piece of killer software like Outlook that makes RSS easy and intuitive.

In this new more advanced world, you will have your own personal RSS address. Not connected to a business or blog content, just to you personally. Yes, you may be thinking… “just like my email address”. When someone wants to hear from you, they will go to some fancy Web 2.0 service and subscribe to your personal RSS feed. They will sign-up for their own personal RSS feed and then subscribe to yours, providing you with their name (if they are a friend) and perhaps their interests if they are a business contact. When you want to send them, and only them a message, you’ll open up the fancy wysiwyg editor provided by the cool Web 2.0 service mentioned above, create a message and publish it.

That’s not here yet. In the meantime, here is an RSS resource from Mashable. And, here is a link to a previous THINKing post, Top 16 RSS Links. And in the interest of balanced reporting, here’s some good email news.

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