RSS and Mailing Lists

Just a quick thought. RSS is very obviously in a bad shape. Mailing lists on the other hand are as good as ever.

There’s two reasons for this:

• RSS got its lunch eaten by alternatives who offered more (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit). Why waste time checking your RSS reader when you’ve already most of it on twitter?
• Second, mailing lists are set and forget. You’ve only got to check your inbox from time to time, which you probably already do.

There’s one takeaway:

People are busy. If you want them to use your app, make it ‘set and forget’.

By the way, email is a great way to do this because it doesn’t require people to think of your app. There’s not a whole lot of apps out there who use it in a meaningful way.