We know thousands of you are already following Woot’s adventures through our RSS feed. But if you think RSS is just a reader that keeps you updated on your favorite blogs, you’re missing a very fast, very cool boat, like a yacht with free margaritas and an onboard video arcade. As seen on Slashdot, RSS marketer Sharon Housley is already proclaiming that despite their role in its origins, blogs are not the future of RSS. RSS is quickly becoming The Little Syndication Format That Could, potentially as useful and universal as the web itself.
Don’t take our word for it: check out this Alwayson-Network article by Chris Selland, which posits that RSS could replace email, especially for marketing purposes. The story happens to mention Woot as among the “early-adopter-focused companies” using RSS. Because several of us have roots in the blog world, RSS seemed like a natural way to begin to mesh weblog and ecommerce functions.
Now, the web graveyard is littered with the bones of such saviors, like all that “push technology” hailed so rapturously in the mid-’90s that ultimately amounted to nothing. And unlike Selland, we’d say RSS could integrate with and complement existing channels like email and the web, not supplant them by any means.
But there are potentially huge advantages to RSS, and here’s why: it’s designed to organize online content into machine-readable form. It’s still in its earliest stages now, like when the web was just a bunch of black text on a grey background. But theoretically, someday, people could write automated programs that use RSS information in ways our backwards minds can only begin to grasp. For instance: say you want a Bag O' Crap but you also want a good nights' sleep. An RSS application could scan every new Woot until the almighty bag comes up, automatically log you in, order it, and provide payment and shipping info, all while you sleep. This isn’t possible yet (at least not until somebody codes it), but RSS lays the groundwork.
So yeah, that little aggregation of news headlines in your RSS reader is just the beginning. If you’re into podcasting, you’re using RSS already, whether you realize it or not. As we see RSS incorporated into web browsers, email clients, and other applications (as envisioned by Microsoft, among others), more and more of its now-hidden potential will be revealed.
We vastly prefer RSS as a marketing tool over ye olde methods, like SMASH THE MONKEY banners and CIALLIS VAALIUM VIAGGRA spam, for reasons both pragmatic and ethical. It lets blogmasters and other F.O.W. (friends of Woot) easily add constantly updated Woot propaganda to their blogs, emails, whatever. And who knows what new and thrilling uses RSS will be put to, once the wider geek world has a chance to play with it for a while?
If you haven’t checked out our RSS feed, subscribe to http://www.woot.com/blog/rss.aspx for all the latest, greatest, and Wootest news.
What RSS reader do you use and why? What tricks and suggestions can you offer for getting the most out RSS? How we can make our feed smarter, stronger, faster, and just generally more Wooterrific? Let us know here.
