Re: Can someone explain what's so great about RSS?

Justin Patrin wrote:

I've been seeing RSS gaining more and more popularity over the last years and I simply do not understand why. Why is RSS so great? What does it do that is so great and wonderful? The only thing it seems to have over anything else is that it's using XMLwith a standardized format. Other than that, RSS seems to me to be not any more useful than, say, a daily e-mail with news (or whatever) from whatever you're getting the RSS from. I would say that there are two main things that are great about RSS. First, is that it's easier to maintain as someone with a feed. Instead of keeping up a list of email addresses that constantly go bad and worrying about people changing addresses and various account maint. you can just say: To get news I provide use this RSS feed.

Second, it's nice as an end user because rather than visiting 15 news sites daily, which may or may not have been updated, you can see what's new from each location at a quick glance. Beyond this RSS applies to more than news as things like bug programs like Eventum provide an RSS functionality so that I can follow new bugs and updates via a single program. Just how I see it anyway. Rick