I love RSS. Love it to bits. I’m sure people are bored silly with me telling them how great it is, and how it’s going to be huge this time next year. (Oh, and by the way – this year. Definitely.) But I want more. A lot more.
I’m waiting for a delivery from an outdoor goods supplier. They’re taking their time getting my item to me. I want an RSS feed that tells me when the item gets sent; and ideally, with package-tracking from the moment it gets sent, to the moment it lands on my doorstep. I’m getting tired of checking my email, and my bank account, to see if there’s any news. I want a disposable RSS feed for each order ID, until the item arrives.
In my work, I’m currently managing an outsourced programming job. The company in question has an online ‘service desk’ application. Each call has its own page, and updates are posted in a big ‘call history’ field. Apparently I’m meant to log into the site every so often, to see if things have progressed. I want an RSS feed for each call reference.
RSS is such an efficient channel, it’s crying out to be used in so many situations – and I’m sure it will be. We’re already seeing signs of this, in various ‘Web 2.0’ applications which offer RSS feeds at individual page level, instead of site-wide. Things like Writely, or Writeboard, or even tracking comments on a particular WordPress blog posting. (A lot of Ws there!) But my current RSS reader of choice, Bloglines, isn’t exactly suited to this easy-come-easy-go disposability, and I don’t imagine a heavy-duty solution like the forthcoming ‘Office 12’ Outlook working well either.
I need an RSS ‘scribble pad’, separate from my heavy-duty aggregator. Ideally a drag-and-drop desktop app, maybe something in the ‘widget’ world, which isn’t going to take up much screenspace or memory. When I place my order, or log my call, the confirmation screen or email receipt has a unique, probably password-protected RSS link on it. I drag the link into my mini-RSS reader, and it hollers when an update comes in. When the job gets done, I need a one-click delete option to drop the feed.
But hey, enough of my yakking. What do you say, developers? Let’s boogie! 🙂
Responses
[…] Richard at Read/Write Web has pointed to a (rather technical) discussion about ‘disposable RSS feeds’. It’s something I wrote about a few weeks ago – but because I’m not a big-shot blogger (yet), nobody noticed. […]
[…] Simon Dickson has a slightly different approach – he wants a separate RSS aggregagator for the temporary stuff. I’m not so sure that I want multiple aggregators, but I agree with his basic premise. […]