The Pull Model

This is an interesting description of how webfeeds differ from email (and if we had a pound for every time we’ve had this question from clients!) from Ross Mayfield:

The Pull Model of attention management puts the user back in control of what consumes their time. Email notifications at the interval of their choosing, RSS the subscribe to, and more imporantly, unsubscribe from on their own accord. To state it once again, RSS is pull, not push. The model only works when a user can leverage:

• Transparency — when everything is on a need-to-know and C.Y.A. basis, occupational spam proliferates and social discovery suffers. When people work openly you can browse the periphery of your attention when its less scarce.
• Amplification — when other people find something of interest they can edit it or link to it to bring back to top of group mind. In other words, when you miss something in a first scan, there is a greater chance people will bring it to your attention. First order merits of attention are usually personal, covered by email and IM. Second order merits of attention are more difficult to judge at first pass and are best offloaded to a group.
• Search — when you have confidence in your ability to recall the past, you can focus on the critical path of the present.

I think this can be summed up as “email is reactive, webfeeds are proactive”. I’m following around 350 feeds on a daily basis - which probably amounts to over 1,500 items a day. But the workload involved in keeping up with these is a fraction of the time it takes for me to follow half-a-dozen email lists - and the disruption of the lists is magnified by the interruption factor of new mail arriving. By contrast, I’m in complete control of the update frequency of my newsreader.

So far much of the attention on webfeeds has been about using them to follow blogs - but I think this ‘email replacement’ view of the world is actually missing the larger implication, something I’ll go into in more depth on a subsequent post.