Tim Bray has some great potential applications for RSS and then goes on to explain some of its barriers to adoption. I would love it if I could get an RSS feed of transactions on my back account. A lot of the stuff that you could use RSS for could also be accomplished with email, but the feel of RSS and email are completely different. RSS items just feel more transient to me, and RSS aggregators treat them as being more transient than email messages. For whatever reason, I allow email to pile up in my in box. I try to keep only interesting items that I intend to file or items that I have not yet replied to but inevitably lots of other stuff ends up getting saved there as well. Then there’s the fact that I never empty my trash — my work mailbox has thousands of items in the deleted folder. My RSS reader is blissfully clean of old stuff, just the way I like it. So even though some people may think that RSS is redundant (and I assure you that it’s a complaint you’ll hear when you talk about new applications for it), the manner of usage is just as important as the basic technical specification for how the protocol or data format works.