So what can you actually DO with RSS?

If you’ve been wondering about the practical use of RSS feeds, consider this idea from Phil Windley:

My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident–someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said “Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don’t see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted.” In essense, they were reporting “on time, on budget.” They called again today to give him an update. That gave me the idea that what I’d really like is for the body shop (or anyone else providing similar service) to tell me: “Mr. Windley, we’ve emailed you the URL of a personal RSS feed we’ve set up for you. Load it into your feed reader and you will see twice-daily status reports on your vehicle.” I’m a geek–sue me.

And when you consider that the majority of organisations will have some sort of database-driven system to capture the details of each customer transaction, then the implementation of something like this becomes trivial in the grand scheme of things.