Parcel tracking is a pain. When I buy something online, I’d like the last page in the purchasing process to give me an RSS feed to which I could subscribe to track the delivery - I find reading feeds much less intrusive than email these days.
But I don’t want that feed hanging around in my reader after the parcel has been delivered. Somehow the feed would have to indicate to my reader that no more updates should be expected, that the subscription had expired.
My reader would then archive the feed for me and stop checking it.
One way to do this would be through the HTTP status codes. There is the 410 Gone return code that, according to the spec, implies that “the requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known.”
But this doesn’t seem quite right - it’s an error code for a start. I suggest we need another status in the 2xx range to imply discontinued or frozen.
Having this simple functionality expands the usefulness of RSS - I might want other things to be published in this way. A few examples - live train times that freeze once the train has arrived at its destination; project feeds that are frozen on completion; customer service cases; and so on.
I’m not sure it’s a killer feature, but I think it would help me in a small way - if a couple of the feed readers with large user bases added support for it, I’m sure that many more services would start using it.
Of course, it wouldn’t take long until the marketeers got their hands on it - they’d probably call it a ‘touch point’ - and started piping spam down the channel, destroying it like they destroyed email. But in the meantime, I can think of all kinds of interesting services that could be built around self-destructing feeds.
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I’ve wondered about this too. Often I’ll want to follow comments on a particular page (see, for example fridaycities.com), but not have to keep a huge bundle of RSS feeds in my reader, most of which will never be updated again after some point. But then, perhaps that would really be solved by client software that was better at archiving old feeds; sweeping them under some digital rug perhaps.
RSS is becoming the notification mechanism that I prefer, rather than email, even for things like mailing lists, continuous integration notifications and so on. Email is a conversational tool. If a system wants to send me a message that doesn’t require a response, RSS (or something a lot like it) should be the carrier of choice.
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