RSS: The Ultimate Opt-In Solution

Thursday, Sep. 30 2004 | Author: DarkBlue

David Sklar suggest that RSS could be the “Ultimate Opt-In Solution” over on the O’Reilly Developer Weblogs. I have to say, he has a good point.

If I could just add a personalized feed into my feed reader, we (me and the company) would both be better off: I can trust the source of the message, so I don’t need to do any spam filtering. I can retrieve the feed over an SSL connection, so it’s a feasible way to provide sensitive data like a bank statement or monthly bill. The company I’m getting the feed from knows when my feed is retrieved so it has some rough metrics for determining that I’ve actually received the data in the feed.

Doesn’t this sound like a good idea? As spam-filters become ever-more aggressive, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for commercial email to make it through to the desktop. However, if the corporate were to supply password-protected, SSL-encrypted RSS feeds to its customers they would be almost guaranteed to achieve delivery.

Sounds like a win-win for both parties.

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One Response for "RSS: The Ultimate Opt-In Solution"

JC

September 30th, 2004 at 6:21 pm
1

I have to laugh a bit. Half our customers can’t even comprehend “click here if you have never used this system before” and we had to remove the login box from the page and make them click the appropriate link before they can see the login box they need. Them… RSS?
But for the 2-3% of clueful RSS lovin’ people out there, maybe it’d work. You’d have to teach the RSS reader to do HTTP post, since I don’t think SSL helps much if the username and password are in the URL (could be wrong about that, but it would definitely make people uneasy seeing their passwords there); and of course you’d have to deal with the fact that a goodly number of RSS readers are web-based and the websites they reside on are NOT SSL encrypted…

I can see it being a useful opt-in venue for non-secure things, if by useful you mean “a way to keep them from sending me crap I don’t want” … after all, the reason marketers hate opt-in so much is that almost no one would ever opt in, given the choice.

It’s an idea though. What I think it’d be FAR more useful for than bank statements, though, is things like CD and other interest rates. I may even bring that one up with my boss, it’d be quite easy to implement.