Are webfeeds ready for the mainstream?

Courtesy of Alex Barnett (an Online Customer Experience Manager at Microsoft, whatever one of those might be), here’s a useful matrix comparison of email and RSS for direct marketing purposes, with links to relevant articles.

He makes an interesting point - that the debate needs to move away from RSS-versus-email and towards where RSS can fit into the marketing mix. It’s a pragmatic approach, to be sure, but I think it misses one key point - that customer adoption of RSS is miniscule, compared to email. While it’s good to be prepared, there’s a danger here of preparing prematurely. In our conversations with clients and others, the proportion of those who are aware of weblogs is very small, and the proportion who are aware of RSS (or webfeeds as we should now be calling them) is even smaller.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of activity in providing webfeeds - and if organisations like the BBC are providing feeds, then mass adoption is certainly possible. But currently it’s very much a bleeding-edge activity to be actively subscribing to and reading webfeeds, and our impression is that at least partly due to the lack of reading tools on the average desktop.

If you’re in a corporate environment, then it’s unlikely that you have the ability - either physically or ‘legally’ - to install webfeed-reading software; and the larger the corporate environment, the more conservative IT functions tend to be in rolling out new applications. So unless you’ve installed a webfeed reader personally, it’s likely to be a phenomenon that not yet reached you.

So what’s it going to take to make webfeeds hit the mainstream? Is it the provision of a mass-market webfeed reader (i.e. webfeed capability being included in the next iteration of Outlook?) Or will it be a more gradual process?

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