Rok, from what I can see, you're right. But big companies move slow, especially when they target market for what you propose is still very small in relative terms. Their consideration is probably "what else could we do with our time and money?" Until the consumer jumps on the RSS bandwagon, it's not likely to change in a hurry.

Absolutely right, good stuff.

I agree and disagree. The market may still be relatively slow in comparison to e-mail, but the pain on the other side is quite a big one. And especially now, with IE7, this should no longer be an issue, especially with some consumer education.

The question in the end is, how important transactional messaging really is to you?

Given all the abuses, it should be top of the list for the big companies.

The problem with this idea is that companies like those you name who have gazillions of customers would need a lot of extra server power to deal with all of those customers polling for new messages all the time. I can't imagine a very large percentage of their customers get messages from them anywhere near as often as an RSS reader polls a feed. And slowing down polling is an imperfect solution, because some messages need to be delivered quickly (eg. "somebody just out bid you on this auction that's ending in 45 minutes"). More widespread support for cryptographically signed email might be the better solution to this problem.

Antone, sorry I didn't get back to this earlier. Yes, there are bandwidth issues, but if companies like EzineArticles.com can manage 44,000 RSS feeds, I'm sure that Amazon could manage the extra server needs, especially since transactional messaging is a mission critical activity.

Hiya Rok,

I am a bit late to this post...but you're right on. I wrote about this a while back and called them functional feeds:

http://www.surfarama.com/2006/02/12/feed-me/

I want feeds for any persistent relationship I have which could include Amazon and Paypal (password protected of course), but also any organization who I have routine 'transactions' with, eg. utilities etc...

Why can't I get a feed from my telephone company/ISP which could once a month deliver my invoice to my desktop as an enclosure in the feed so my reader automatically downloads it? Doesn't take much to come up with lots of examples like this.

BTW, Antone is right to bring up bandwidth as an issue. And while it is a solvable issue I don't think 44,000 feeds at ezinearticles is a useful comparison...how many of those are actually being accessed routinely? And even if they are all active, that doesn't really compare to say Amazon or PayPal who conceivably would have millions of unique feeds.

Cheers

Charles

Hiya Rok,

I am a bit late to this post...but you're right on. I wrote about this a while back and called them functional feeds:

http://www.surfarama.com/2006/02/12/feed-me/

I want feeds for any persistent relationship I have which could include Amazon and Paypal (password protected of course), but also any organization who I have routine 'transactions' with, eg. utilities etc...

Why can't I get a feed from my telephone company/ISP which could once a month deliver my invoice to my desktop as an enclosure in the feed so my reader automatically downloads it? Doesn't take much to come up with lots of examples like this.

BTW, Antone is right to bring up bandwidth as an issue. And while it is a solvable issue I don't think 44,000 feeds at ezinearticles is a useful comparison...how many of those are actually being accessed routinely? And even if they are all active, that doesn't really compare to say Amazon or PayPal who conceivably would have millions of unique feeds.

Cheers

Charles