Extending RSS to your Mailing List?
I hate the format of mailing lists. I hate having a bunch of emails in my mailbox mixed in with my every day mail. I hate owning a separate email account for mailing lists. I hate being forced to conciously delete all those mailing list posts, every day, that I don’t want any more. I don’t mind these burdens with plain old email, because it’s relatively low volume. It’s when you have to pay attention to a few or more mailing lists of high volume, that you get so much email your head wants to explode. If this wasn’t enough, mailing lists are a pain in the ass to subscribe to and unsubscribe to, something that irks me if I need to watch certain threads for a short period of time. You don’t need to know that I am who I say I am, if I just want to be updated and read your list. Your archiving of my mailing list is irksome, and I don’t want to have to check it a few times a day. I want to be notified of your postings, with as little work for me as possible, and without any commitment to reading your list in the future. If only something could solve this problem…
I love RSS. After I read an entry in my reader, bloglines.com, it dissapears. Sure if I need it later, I just use the search feature. It’s really flippin’ easy to use. Which brings me to my main point…
Does anyone know of an extended version of RSS 2.0 that gives each feed item a unique ID, as well as an optional “in response to” ID? So many times I need to subscribe to a mailing list for a short period of time to watch something, and I do not need to write back. With a spec like this, it could be very useful to have an RSS feed that could be read as a normal feed or even in a threaded format if the user so desired. If you do know of such heavenly specs, do you know any clients that do this?