RSS and dating

October 15th, 2004

In an article entitled, “RSS Feeds Hunger for More Ads”, the last sentence is a quote by Jason Calacanis:

“Visiting the website is dating; getting a daily e-mail is going steady — but subscribing to an RSS feed, well, that is like getting married to a news source,’ he said. ‘It’s really the highest commitment you can make.”

I disagree: In fact, I believe the exact opposite is true. Visiting a website takes alot more commitment than subscribing to the feed. You actually have to go to the site every day (or even more often than that) if you are not using RSS. That takes commitment. Subscribing to a feed, IMO, is like a one night stand. You’ve visited the site once, liked what you saw and threw it in your aggregator, without having to think about it afterwards. Plus, you can unsubscribe without a second thought.

Marriage requires work. RSS is easy. You don’t have to work at reading content from an aggregator.

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