Spam has ruined email, and it doesn't appear that anything will fix the problem. The various technical anti-spam measures being proposed are little more than band-aids that, at best, will roll the problem back to the still-horrible levels of a few years ago. The United States had an opportunity last year to create a good, enforceable anti-spam law, but decided instead to create a law that everyone knew would be toothless. Gee, thanks, Congress.
Internet messaging is still dear to my heart, and I very much hope that we can come up with new communications mechanisms that are much more immune to the greed and insensitivity that drives the spam market in email. Instant messaging is doing fairly well for both social and business on-line messaging, and Internet telephony (better known by the cute-sounding name of VoIP) is rapidly maturing. However, neither works as a sensible off-line messaging mechanism like email.
Enter RSS and syndication. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for entries that contain a chunk of content which is usually HTML, and some information about the content such as when it was written, who the author is, and so on. A "feed" is a file that contains a bunch of RSS entries. There are dozens of RSS readers available.
There is also lots of software that creates RSS feeds from weblogs, and that has made people think that RSS is just for weblogs. In the past year, however, we are seeing even more software that creates RSS feeds for information that isn't weblogs. For instance, the New York Times has feeds for much of its web-published news, and some sites such as the Electoral Vote Predictor use RSS to announce daily changes. You can get important weather information. The possibilities are huge.
On the less formal side, people are expecting an explosion of personal photo sites as more cell phones contain simple cameras. Being able to take a picture and immediately upload it directly from your phone to your personal site will be quite attractive to many people. People who can't write well but like to take pictures will have even more reason to have web sites, and will want to tell their friends when there are new pictures there.
Spam's even-more-deceitful cousin, phishing, has made it impossible for companies to send important announcements to their customers because it is nearly as easy to forge these messages as it is for the legitimate senders to create them. This is particularly hurting the financial services industry, but it also affects software vendors and others. Using RSS would eliminate the risk of spoofing and fraud. Once most Internet users have RSS readers, all one-to-many mailing list should be using RSS to avoid all the problems that spam has caused to the email infrastructure.
As a one-to-many announcement mechanism, RSS works fairly well, and can work even better in the future. The early versions of RSS were worked on in closed environments; Atom is is being worked on openly in the IETF. I am co-chair of the IETF's Atompub working group along with Tim Bray. The working group's secretary is Sam Ruby, the initial force behind Atom. The group is coming up with a better format for RSS, as well as a standardized way to post and edit Atom entries in feeds.
The Atompub Working Group has a very active set of developers and content producers helping make the eventual standard better than earlier versions of RSS. This kind of involvement is essential if you want a stable, widely-deployed standard that lasts for decades. I truly believe Atom has that potential.
Posted by lookit at August 11, 2004 07:57 AM