Personal Communications via RSS Doomed?

Personal communications via RSS are a great idea in theory, but not so good in real life.

The benefits are certainly all here:

• Greater content security with fewer hijacking possibilities
• No spam in your personal communications
• Knowing you will receive all the content sent to you without fear of it being stopped by spam filters

In theory, all of this is perfect.

The simplest implementation of this model is simply turning the RSS publishing model upside down. For example, you provide a form on your website for people to contact you. Instead of that form sending you an e-mail it actually allows people to post messages to your personal RSS feed, to which you are subscribed to with your RSS aggregator.

An excellent way for making sure that none of the content that really matters to you, such as messages from your visitors, is ever lost due to spam filters along the way. And you can easily respond to these messages via RSS.

But it gets more complicated when you want to respond to people in the same way - via RSS. In that case they need a similar system that will then allow you to publish your message to their personal communications RSS feed. The first company to do this was Quikonnex, as a part of their RSS publishing platform, although the experience wasn't comparable to the e-mail model.

Now, there's a new player in town: FeedMail Now!

Basically the same concept, but an entire system focused just on personal communications via RSS, and more attuned to the e-mail experience.

Will it work? I'd be willing to bet my money that it won't. For this concept to work, you'd need your partners in communication using the same system. Not going to happen.

While RSS is amazing, some things, such as personal communications, should just be left to e-mail.