Getting passworded RSS feeds in Mail.app working

Password-protected RSS feeds in Mail are a royal PITA to set up - basically Mail.app doesn’t support password authentication natively (or at least it doesn’t support entering the uid/passwords natively.) Here’s a sneaky work-around:

* Add the feed into Mail.app as normal, and let it whinge about not having a password
* Go to Safari, and set it to be the default RSS reader if it isn’t already
* Drop the feed URL into the address field, and respond to the authentication challenge - and allow the details to be saved into your Keychain
* Go back to Mail, where the feed will have automagically updated using the Keychain settings.

Apparently the “make Safari the default reader” step is optional, but your 1.609344 kilometerage may vary.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx

Facebook opening up (slightly)

One of the reasons I’ve never really become that excited over Facebook is the fact that it’s pretty much a walled garden - the first rule of Facebook is never to talk (externally) about Facebook.

That seems to be changing slightly - there’s now RSS feeds available for your friends’ status updates, which plays nicely with a standard RSS reader.

Small steps, but ones which need to be taken…

Email blunders, strike one for RSS

There’s a report on silicon.com this morning about details of 6,500 Floridan HIV patients being emailed by mistake to 800 medical staff:

The list was accidentally attached to an email by a Palm Beach County Health Department statistician and sent to hundreds of health workers who weren’t normally granted access to it, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The department’s tech staff shut down the email system within minutes of the email being sent, by which time an estimated 10 people had opened it. Additional reports put the number at 16 although it isn’t yet known how many actually opened the attachment, AP reports.

Mistakes of this type are something that we’ve all done at some point - that sinking feeling as you realise that you really shouldn’t have clicked the ’send’ button, although thankfully for most people their mistakes aren’t quite as catastrophic as this one.

This is a great example of another reason why email is broken. There’s no practical way to control the dissemination of confidential information by email, whether it’s by mistake as in this case or deliberate. The practical benefit of email - that it’s quick and easy to send information to anyone - is its downfall. Once you’ve sent the message, you’ve got no control over it, as the system administrators in this situation will be able to testify.

If, on the other hand, the Palm Beach County Health Department were using RSS to disseminate this information, the problem would never have occurred in the first place. It’s trivial to wrap a webfeed in the same level of security as you would a secure webpage. You can control access to a feed, and you can keep track of who’s accessing it, and when, and from where. The risks of accidental disclosure are minimised and you have an audit trail - in other words, when the auditors ask whether you’ve done everything you can to protect the information assets of your organisation, you can reply ‘yes’.

Fortunately in this case, the damage appears to have been relatively contained - save for the reputation of the Health Department and the distress of those on the list. But it’ll happen again, you can be sure of that.

The coolest thing we’ve done so far with a blog, a webfeed and an iPod Shuffle

Ok, we’re quite very pleased with this - we think it’s a cool use of blogs, webfeeds, podcasting and an iPod Shuffle in a real live business scenario. We’d be interested to know what people think - comments welcome.

The scenario:

Our client is the classic Type-A personality, time-poor, stressed executive with too much to do and too little time to do it - he spends most of his life on planes in transit between meetings. He needs to keep up with the key developments in competitor intelligence, but gets very little opportunity to sit in front of a screen to browse through reports. Neither does he want to drag a large pile of paper around with him.

The solution:
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Blair the Technophobe

Richard Allan is a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, and has a (deserved) reputation as one of the few UK politicians who a) cares about or b) knows anything about technology. He’s also a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad when it comes to chasing answers to questions about how government is wasting spending our taxes on technology.

Sadly, he’s standing down at the next general election, which means he won’t be around to ask more awkward questions about the disasters that will have occurred by then. But in the meantime he’s able to put Prime Ministers on the spot, and blog about it afterwards.

As an aside, one of the more impressive uses of webfeeds that I’ve come across is directly relevant here - theyworkforyou.com provides an enormous amount of information about the workings of the UK political systems, including webfeeds for the activities of every single one of the 658 MPs in the House of Commons. And equally impressive, or depressing depending on your point of view, is that the entire site has been built by volunteer efforts.

UPDATE: Richard Allan has posted a transcript of the exchange in question - see Tony Blair squirm…

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.

Ten Cool Things You Can Do With Webfeeds

Getting bored with using webfeeds to read blogs? Then here’s the Cutting Through Guide To 10 Cool Things You Can Do With Webfeeds

Get a new slant on the news

Get a new perspective on the world by subscribing to a webfeed from the world’s most respected broadcaster. The BBC offers webfeeds for all its news and current affairs output, together with much more besides.

Find out what’s going on with the weather

Want to know if it’s raining in Linton-on-Ouse? Pay a visit to RSSWeather.com and enter a city, state or ICAO airport code to find out what the weather’s doing at your nearest airport.

Follow in a guru’s footsteps

The management guru’s management guru Tom Peters has a blog where he holds forth about all things guruish - and the contents of his suitcase…

Find out when Granny lands at Heathrow

Waiting for a flight to arrive? Then use Robert Price’s UK flight arrival and departure feeds to check on the ;latest movements of flights to and from the UK. Want to know if her flight from JFK left late - PubSub’s airport alerts feed will keep you informed.

Spy on other people’s bookmarks

Interested in what other people are linking to? Then take a look at the webfeeds at del.icio.us. You can subscribe to the latest bookmarks or an individual keyword that you’re interested in.

Keep track of your bookmarks

Once you’ve set up your own del.icio.us account, grab a webfeed of your bookmarks straight into your newsreader…

Keep an eye on what others are saying about you

Want to know what’s being said about you on the web? Don’t bother Googling when you can use PubSub - just create a personalised feed to search for the search term of your choice, and have the results delivered driect to your newsreader

Find out what your MP has been up to

Wondering what your Member of Parliament has been doing to justify your vote come the next election? Subscribe to their Recent Appearances webfeed, and get details of their questions and contributions to debates in the House of Commons - then fax them about it

Roll your own newsfeed

Found a news source that hasn’t got webfeeds yet (oh, the shame)? No problem - use Newsisfree to grab and build a custom webfeed from their database of 14,000 sources…

Look for items on eBay

Looking for that perfect Christmas present? Set up an eBay search, and then subscribe to the results in your newsreader…

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?

Webfeeds for (not quite) everything

There’s an interesting post from David Sklar over at the O’Reilly Weblogs on how he wants to replace email with webfeeds - in particular situations where a company is communicating with him on a regular basis, for example in a billing scenario.

Inevitably there’s a counter-argument - ‘RSS is not the cure for everything‘, for example. And there are also situations where webfeeds simply don’t work.

Tribe.net is one of many YASNS, albeit one of the more popular ones, and in the last week or so it’s launched a redesign of it’s site together with a bunch of new features remixed with some old ones. One of the most popular areas on the site are the discussion forums for each ‘tribe’, so these have been extensively overhauled. Included in the new features are webfeed subscriptions to each forum, so you can now track the conversations in a newsreader.

In principle, it’s a great idea - bring the conversations to the client, rather than the other way around. In practice, it’s virtually useless. Each separate post becomes a separate webfeed item - so instead of a timelined threaded view which allows you to track the conversation from start to finish in the order that the interactions were made, the webfeed delivers the conversation as a series of disjointed messages as and when they’re uttered. It’s like standing in the middle of a room at a party, listening to a number of conversations, but only being able to hear one voice at a time. Instead of following the flow of the conversation back and forward between participants, you’re constantly hopping from conversation to conversation, trying to figure out what’s been said so far and whether you’ve missed the previous interaction that would put the current one into context.

Contrast that with the way in which blogging software such as Wordpress delivers comments as webfeeds - here the entire conversation becomes a single feed rather than interweaving numerous interactions into one. Alternatively the comments become part of the updated post itself, so there is always the context available to refer to. To pick up the thread of the conversation so far, just read from top to bottom and all becomes clear.

To go back to the billing scenario - as it’s not a backward-and-forward conversation, and each iteration or transaction has a consistent syntax, I could see it working quite well as a webfeed. But interactions that require context to be understood don’t lend themselves to a feed situation nearly as well - you can’t break a conversation down to it’s atomic level and still understand it without that context being provided somehow.

It’ll be interesting to see how Tribe takes their experiment forward, but personally I unsubscribed from the forum webfeeds pretty quickly.

Why you should use RSS in plain English

Found on the excellent Ideal Government site, the clearest explanation I’ve seen so far why you should be providing RSS feeds on your site and for your data - in plain English:

• Having a way to get regular updates from a source you trust and want to follow without remembering to check it regularly is certainly convenient.
• Although updates by email can do that, our inboxes are already full of messages that we are not really interested in. The pull nature of syndication feeds puts the receivers of the information in control, as they can remove the feeds from their news aggregators.
• Newreaders allow you to aggregate feeds from various blogs and websites, which save much time. You do not have to download each page to read the content and you can avoid reading articles whose headlines do not interest you. This is a major advantage for someone (like me) who follows 60+ blogs that are updated a daily.