Well, it looks like some people's wishes will be met by Apple's OS X Tiger, when it integrates RSS reading into the Safari browser. Others may be disappointed, preferring that feed reading eventually migrates to email clients. One thing's for certain, we all want more feeds, even Matt Haughey who, until today, had resisted the urge to even consider reading blogs via RSS.
It may seem obvious to readers of this particular blog that just about anything on the web that changes, whether frequently or infrequently, should have an associated feed. Readers all over rejoice when a major publication decides to hop onboard the syndication freight train. And beyond your typical publications, there are hundreds of innovative services that are just waiting to be remixed with some RSS flavor.
At Supernova, Scott Rosenberg pointed out that privacy policies are a perfect candidate for RSS feeds. I second that. I also want KEXP playlists to be updated hourly. And I'd like car recall notices, too. And coupons for businesses in my ZIP code. And MetaCritic. And Aquarius Records new releases. And so on, and so on…
So, without more ado, here are some RSS requests from people I've talked with in the past few weeks, with more to follow in upcoming posts.
THE RSS WISHLIST
Nick Bradbury: CNN.com, The Onion, and PythOnline.
Marc Orchant: the Getting Things Done discussion forum, The Atlantic Monthly Online
Bill Flitter: Google (for ongoing searches), MediaPost, LinkedIn, ClickZ, any communication with a third-party company, i.e — purchase confirmations, shipping updates, etc.
Brent Simmons: "I get frequent requests for feeds from large
publishers. Lots of people want CNN, USA Today,
MSNBC, and so on. Though there are lots of major news sites providing feeds, there
are still plenty that aren't, yet."
Kevin Fox: "I wish FedEx and
UPS had an RSS feed for packages that are on their way to me. I wish I had a feed
that aggregated any order I place anywhere on the web, so if I order from Amazon,
I can see the order status in my RSS reader.
Actually, I wish Amazon had an RSS feed of things it thinks I might like (and not the crappy housewares and overstock 'gold box' crap, I mean the recommendations it knows I want). I also want 'Shows my TiVo is going to record in the next few days.'"
Scott Rafer: Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones; various My Yahoo! components — stocks, comics, weather, etc; Evite
Michael Sippey: "Until my entire family gets their act
together and starts using Flickr for photo sharing, I want an RSS feed from
Ofoto of new pics of my nieces, nephews and cousins. That feed could be
sucked up by a screen saver, or scripted to rotate as my desktop background, or have one every N photos auto-shipped to
the photo printer.
I want a secure and fully authenticated spliced real-time feed of transactions from my checking account, my Visa and
my Mastercard. Not for integration into Quicken (although that would be nice), but just for auditing purposes.
I could build a service that monitors for transactions above a specific dollar amount, or from particular
vendors. Otherwise, it's just a quick review for things out of the ordinary.
I want a feed from my webserver of top referrers; something that's easily transformed into a micro linkblog of ego
gratification. I want a feed from my home's gas and electric meter. And a feed of my local weather (not
forecasts, historical weather), so that I can auto-load both into Excel and chart energy usage by weather
patterns."
So, what do you want to become available via RSS? Leave your requests in a comment. If you really wow me, you might just get a gmail invitation….
1. Hi,
just wanted to point out that many of these sources have RSS feeds on NewsIsFree. If you want the full list of items (with description if available), then it's not free, but $20 year wil get any number of those feeds.
ClickZ does have feeds: http://www.jupiterweb.com/rss/clickz.html
Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Mike Krus