I have to pick my friend up from the airport in a couple of hours, but his flight has been delayed and it might be delayed further. Northwest lets you sign up for their notification service, but doing that is always annoying. Would an RSS feed be practical in this situation? If you're just tracking one flight, the life of the feed would be only until it reaches its destination. Does the creation of RSS feeds burden a webserver to the point where this is impractical? Currently NWA notifies you via email. I guess it's reinventing the wheel to use RSS but maybe there are times when it would be more of an advantage than email--like if you wanted to track a large number of people who are all going to the same meeting. Using RSS, one webpage with all the different meeting participants' flight information would be updated when new information would be made available. That way the arrival times would be centralized and available to many people rather than stuffed in one person's inbox.
Using RSS instead of e-mail for notifications makes a great deal of sense for many reasons, including automatic categorization and avoiding spam issues.
An e-mail inbox is sort of like a television with only one channel and every broadcaster (legitimate or otherwise) vying for your attention. RSS introduces the notion of channels--containers for categorized information--something that was obviously necessary for televisions. Now, when you care about a particular topic (whether NWA flight updates or Seinfeld reruns), you can focus your attention on the appropriate channel, be it on television or in your newsreader.
For more info on the subject of RSS vs. e-mail, check out this channel:
E-Mail Marketing Woes
http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/11725
Posted by: F. Andy Seidl | September 22, 2004 at 12:15 PM