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Saturday, June 12, 2004
re-mail 
| | Yesterday I quoted a friend's e-mail that said RSS is opt-in authenticated Email. That was it. Later I got this response: |
| | But RSS is most-certainly opt-in, but it's only "authenticated Email" by virtue of the fact that the usage has been so small, that authentication (of Digital ID) was not a big necessity. |
| | Iow, it operates effectively as a trust-network, but only for now. |
| | Obviously, RSS isn't e-mail. But what might it bring to email that isn't there now? In a word, relationship. |
| | Unwelcome e-mail doesn't relate to the recipient. Welcome e-mail relates, and not just because it's present on a white list or absent from a black list; or whether anybody has opted into anything. A mail of any kind is welcomed either because the reader knows the writer, or because both share a social millieu within which greetings between two people who don't know each other are permitted or even encouraged. |
| | Mail is, essentially, personal. That it also carries invoices and other necessary institutional correspondence does not make it less so. Institutions (such as public utilities and government agencies) are social millieus too. As a form of mail, e-mail is also, essentially, personal. And when people correspond with any persistence, they don't just converse. They relate. |
| | Now think about the relationships supported by what RSS provides: notification, subscription, syndication. The first two give new meaning to the third, when you think about what can be done to make email as personal as mail was in the first place. I would gladly subcribe to writers whose correspondence is accompanied by an RSS notification. I would gladly syndicate my willingness to relate with people who know me, within the context of an email system that respects the meaning of the verb relate. |
| | What we hate about email is that "marketers" in Tier 3 use it to "penetrate," "capture" and otherwise insult us in Tier 1: |
| | What we miss about old fashioned mail mail is simple relationships between Tier 1 and Tier 2: between ourselves and everybody else: |
| | If we can get that from e-mail, by making it re-mail — relationship mail — and make Tier 3 go away, would it be worth the effort? |
| | Can those three verbs (notify, subscribe, syndicate) from RSS give us the relationship-support tools we need to solve both the identity problem and the email problem along with it? Is Really Simple Email someting RSS can make possible? I dunno. It just has me thinking. Or digging, as Dave says. |
| | Start reading here and see what you think. |
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