Maybe the hypothetical person in the street will never care about the amount of stuff coming into her inbox, so getting updates by email will continue. But in the last 6 or 7 years we have seen knowledge of spam and email overload complaints go from virtually zero to almost universal amongst corporate and small business users and home users are not going to be far behind. This must have an impact on mail out updates.

Most people will continue to use a web site to view online content; most people will continue to use email to communicate with their friends; but just because most people don’t drive BMWs doesn’t make them out of the mainstream.

One of the great things about RSS feeds is that they replace mass mailouts with something far more suitable. Why manage a mailing list of thousands of privacy-sensitive email addresses, send thousands of copies of a single article through thousands of mail servers to thousands of inboxes, and handle thousands of bounce messages, just so that thousands of people are left having to sort their site updates from their regular email.

In fact you said it yourself…

“Email is completely different since it allows people to communicate with one another while RSS just acts as an asynchronous communication tool.”

Many people are on the receiving end of mass mailouts, and when they discover that these are far easier to manage via an RSS feed reader, and that they don’t even need to divulge their email address to the publishers, they’ll hop on board in no time.

Does anyone know about SET/SSL/PKI?
They’ve become transparent and power secure transactions.

In the same way, I think RSS will ‘disappear’ into the backend. A sign of technological maturity is that it evolves beyond it’s ‘whiz bang’ perception to becoming something that’s transparently useful.

Maybe we need more people to create/offer feeds that are a pre-gathered, pre-grouped aggregation of their opinion of the best of (whatever the topic).

Also, I agree that our software needs to continue to evolve, in order to make it easier for the average user to subscribe. Our browsers, by default, should already be extremely easy to switch between aggregator versus browser. Or when we bookmark a page, to automatically have the option to subscribe to any available RSS feeds for the site. Maybe the browser toolbar — small, subtlety — by default, automatically displays a count of the number of feeds available; with a subscribe button?

IMHO, it’s those improvements that will make feeds become mainstream.

The problem that faces us today is finding a way to make feeds seem useful, and implement a more graceful way to use them. Feeds are going to exist mainstream or not.

IE7, Outlook 07, and Windows Vista all push feeds on their users, so I can’t help but think thats going to generate interest and push RSS more to the fore-front; however like I said earlier it will never make it mainstream without a more sophisticated method of introduction and usage.

those who’ve installed the google toolbar can hit the “Subscribe” button to pick up the RSS feed off a site they like.

when i got into blogging, i couldnt figure out RSS, no thanks to some techiness required.

now with services like my yahoo and my google making it easier for the everyman to subscribe to feeds, it smooths out the adoption curve.

save for content hounds, i dont see many people subscribing to 100 feeds (ok, besides the few of us). but it’s like cable TV. you have 100 channels (and might still have nothing to watch)…

i see a lot of web enabling technologies as providing consumers with choice and it’s not a forced adoption for sure.

RSS harkens back to about the mid 1990s, and i instigated some of this discussion with my blogging in 2007 meme. check it out at: http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/blogging/blogging-2007-meme/