Now that I’m officially an RSS/Atom addict, I want to get my feed fix for pretty much everything. Most of my current feeds are not blogs, incidentally, but range from news to weather forecasts to favorite comic strips to software build notifications at work.

But my addiction is not mollified. Here are the top things I wish I could get in a good feed:

1. Airline flight status

   Wouldn’t it be nice to navigate to the flight you’re interested in, grab the feed for it, and let your reader tell you that Aunt May’s flight was delayed an hour, but then got an adjusted arrival time? They’re already showing that data in an HTML table, why not gimme a feed? (Yeah, some of the airlines will email you flight status updates. Yawn. RSS is so much better for this kind of thing.) The beauty is that your RSS/Atom reader would show you the deltas* of information updates.

2. Retail pricing

   I’m not Mr. Big Shopper, but there are items here an there that I’d like to keep an eye on to find out when they go on sale. Sort of like EBay’s “watch item”, but without the old-school email.

   For example, it would be slick if Price Grabber provided a feed that tells you when a new merchant is selling the iPod shuffle cheaper than everyone else. (Marketing people at Price Grabber: This would be a great opt-in way get return visitors without being intrusive or needing personal information.)

3. Homeland Security Status

   Without sounding too glib, if we’re getting nuked, I’d like my reader to tell me about it. I’m sorry, but this sorry piece of XML doesn’t cut it. Honestly, somebody please use some of my tax dollars to at least conform to the RSS .91 spec? Somebody?

   Even the Amber Alert system can be monitored via RSS. Wouldn’t the threat of an imminent terrorist attack in your city be worth knowing about at first warning, rather than tonight on the evening news?

4. SNMP-to-RSS bridge

   Why not make everything that can be monitored with SNMP be served via RSS or Atom? Here’s an interesting (and easy) script to demonstrate poor man’s RSS-as-SNMP. The possibilities from this kind of approach are wide-open… and very cool. (The need for securing some of this information, however presents a problem. More on that later.)

   Along these lines: most hosting companies have a network status page (like mine) for their servers. I don’t want to bookmark-and-visit every day to see what’s going on; I want my reader to tell me. Again, they already did the work in an HTML table… spend the 30 minutes it would take to make it a feed.

5. Bank Transactions

   Yes, I mean it. If we can secure online banking, we can do secure RSS/Atom feeds. I want to know when checks clear, when my paycheck gets deposited, and when my mortgage payment is automatically withdrawn.

   The problem is having a decent free reader that does both HTTPS and robust (up to NTLM) authentication. I have yet to find one that handles both. And before you suggest NewsGator online, don’t. Despite their claims I have had no success at trying to get to authenticated feeds.

To quote my son: Are we there yet? How about now? How about now? I can only hope as RSS/Atom becomes more common outside of the blogosphere that businesses start to tap into the potential. Until then, we wait.

* Pun not intended.

Addendum (March 3, 2005):
More info on secured feeds can be found in my new post here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005 at 12:00 and is filed under syndication, rome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.