It’s been a long time coming, but Email, or rather the apps and applets that provide it, are developing into services that people will enjoy to use rather be forced to use. The advent of RSS can be seen as a significant advantage for virtually anyone who browses the web, it simply a matter implementing it right.
Google’s crack at the free email market arrived at little over 18 months ago with the Gmail service. With the headline grabbing 1 GB of free space and, in my opinion the significantly developed interface, Google has made considerable inroads into MSN and Yahoo’s market. Gradually improved, the service now offers many features formally only available from paid email providers and pop email clients. With the space now exceeding 2.6GB and features such as the ability to search and label (much like tagging) all your emails very quickly and conveniently, Gmail offers a fresh and interesting take on a stale formula.
Gmail’s belated integration of RSS in the form of web clips though strikes me as somewhat a half hearted attempt. The integration of email and RSS seems immediately obvious but Gmail’s Web clips can only be considered a short sighted attempt to get people to their personalised homepage. These web clips appear above the Gmail interface but are nothing more than a distraction that harks back to the Web 1.0 days of scrolling banners. Googles implementation of RSS, making very little use of what is a stellar implementation of XML, is currently little more than a check box ticked on the Gmail feature sheet!
RSS as a feature is certainly in its infancy though as a technology it’s been around for a number of years. 2006 will be the year that the world embraces RSS and it appears, amongst some of the hottest start-ups, Google’s major competitors seem to have the jump on it.
Yahoo’s well documented improvement to their Mail interface is long overdue but their acquisition of Oddpost has undoubtedly helped as these early pictures show. Yahoo’s Mail beta is in full swing and their integration of RSS has had very good previews from the Search Engine Journal and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. This seems to me to be the more intuitive solution to seperate programs or sites and perhaps could lead to an interesting convergence between web based RSS apps and with an existing webmail apps? Anyone for a Gmail and Bloglines mashup?
In all seriousness, it will be interesting how Bloglines and its peers are developed in the next year or so. With the news of Microsoft’s Office 12, integrating RSS with Outlook (something Thunderbird has offered for probably two years) there is inevitably gonna be some fall out. When Office lands, which is likely to coincide with Vista, any ‘new’ technology such as RSS that is provided for by a third party plugin will cease to continue as a feasible form of revenue for its developers. This has been going on for years but at least we can be safe in the knowledge that by the time you hear about your competitors products in beta and you haven’t flipped, its time to look for that next big idea!
