[Sigia-l] Email versus RSS

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

Dear all,

I am not sure if that is on topic here - please correct me if not.

Below I present my analysis of the differences between mailing lists
and RSS aggregation.  When you design an application you can add and
modify everything and you can take an email reader and move it in any
direction you want.  The subject of my analysis are the basic
characteristics that make an email reader an email reader even if it
looks completely different and even if you don't call the messages you
read emails.

Back to the analysis.  Both email lists and RSS are message based communication
tools that realize a Publish-Subscribe protocol (.  These are the
similarities - now differences.
Mailing lists are primarily topical aggregators, while RSS aggregates by author.
Of course there are extensions - in
many mail readers you can use killfiles to filter out particular
authors, and probably some RSS aggregators let the user aggregate by
topic too, but these are extensions - not the primary modus operandi.

Consequences:
- mailing lists are more conversational, in RSS you need to reach
outside to find out who is replying to who etc
- even if there are topic extensions for RSS there are no means for
negotiating the topic


Other differences:
- archives: in RSS usually you have all historic postings, in
mailing lists there is no native mean for archives, you need to add web
interface
- addressing: RSS as web technology has address for each post, in
mailing lists you can have it only if you need a web archive for it
- mailing lists are real time (less than IM, but still), RSS is based on polling


We need something that would let us aggregate both by author and
topic. Current situation is not so bad - if we are into some topic we
choose mailing list, if we value someones writing we subscribe to his
RSS.  Filtering by both author and topic might be too constraining and
destroy serendipity, but this might change when the information overload grows.
What is lacking is aggregation by both and this is also constraining
discoverability.
When we discover an interesting author it would be nice to know where
else we can find
his writings.


This all shows that the Universal Inbox
(http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/UniversalInbox) concept is not
enough, we need
a Universal Outbox as well.  One solution to that were Social
Networking Sites - where
you could browse other discussions an interesting person is following,
but this was never
build consequently.

Ideas:
- RSS channels for all of our public writings (technical solution cc to our
personal archive?)
- links to email lists archives from personal sites

-- Zbyszek