Royal and I talk about RSS and alerts in plane.
Funny, on the plane down to California yesterday, who was sitting right next to me? Royal Farros, the CEO I had met with earlier in the day.
We both thought it was funny that we were sitting next to each other. Some sort of cosmic plan in action. "We could have just met on the plane" he said. So, we just continued our discussion about how alerts might work. He's also a real interesting guy who has tons of stories about the technology industry. He told me about how Microsoft Office on the Macintosh beat his company's product (Ready-Set-Go). He was co-founder of T/Maker (they made software for the Mac in the 1980s).
Anyway, we talked more about what if it were possible to trigger an alert with RSS automatically? (Without spamming weblog readers?) How about if weblog tools could add an alert capability right into their User Experience? For instance, I'm typing to you right now in Radio UserLand. What if there were a little button there that said "send your users an alert?"
Wouldn't that be cool? Think about that. Dave Winer could send my phone an alert if he wanted to. Let's say there was a big news story that was just breaking. Webloggers could send out alerts to their readers.
We also talked about how bad email is. He told me how he's unsubscribed from email mailing lists before and he continued to get email from them. He also told me that's why he loves RSS so much. Unsubscribe from a feed and it's gone. No questions asked.
We're gonna talk about this on Monday morning in my speech about why RSS is important to businesses. The email marketing channel is broken. What's left? RSS.
Oh, someone asked in my comments how my alerts work. I sign into a Web page, fill in a form with what I want sent out through the Alerts system, and schedule the alert to go out (I can send it immediately, or at a time I choose). Pretty interesting, but needs a bit of training. Royal's team is working on making it easier for webloggers and is listening to feedback here (he's participating in my comments). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
5:52:49 PM 
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