A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time.
Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”, while email has no target audience.
When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that.
Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hits reply-all, suddenly the subject line for the thread is now "Re: <the original subject>" and my followups no longer thread.
I'll just make sure that my followups always have "Re: " in them, so they thread whether or not people have been communicating on the thread. This mostly works, but if the update is a week or two later, gmail just decides they shouldn't thread.
This is on top of the fact that emails with similar subject lines occasionally thread together. This gets really annoying when you send automated emails where the subjects are the same except for an identifier of some sort (specifically to prevent threading).
And there's no way to give feedback to gmail about this. No way to forcefully thread or de-thread emails. You are just given the choice of gmail's threading or no threading at all.
* A decent bulk actions interface.
* Threading
* Filter on email headers
* Apply rules based on message age (e.g. twitch "is now live" messages are irrelevant after 1 day.
Some automated emails get threaded together when I'd prefer them separately (error notifications and other alerts) but it's minor enough that I've never even looked into whether there's a workaround.
How ever TCP/IP protocols won the standards war which on balance is better - other wise you'd have what your PTT wanted to have sub :-)
https://cr.yp.to/immhf/header.html
That's got to be a sitter of a security hole for something, right?
I blame social media. It's basically their agenda to offer everything within there walled garden. And so it was only natural that FB at some point disabled RSS.
Fortunately, wordpress generates RSS per default so many will keep providing rss feeds (without even knowing about it)
SPF, DKIM and DMARC seem to be making a real dent here though. DKIM is the most complicated to implement and manage since ideally you want to periodically rotate the keys and it has to be implemented at the sending server level instead of the DNS.
Any time you try to make things work without a single central point it makes the whole thing harder to grasp and explain. Open ID was another example. End-user contact points try to simplify things by "productizing" the offering and hiding the implementation details, with various degrees of success.
> The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?
That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of (except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation by itself) really captures it.
I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.
I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes, especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.
So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and didn't see podcasting as being a big deal--which they were sort of right about; arguably even today it's somewhat mainstream but I'd bet the majority of people in the US have never listened to a podcast and certainly don't listen regularly.
A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna.
So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away?
I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.
Many people don't want to have to deliberately choose content a lot of the time. I've heard people argue that they don't want to always have to use Netflix because they can't just flip on a channel and/or channel surf.
Everybody else just used YouTube.
I love their UI, but the fact I can't load RSS feeds directly is making me look around for alternatives, so maybe it's a risky bet.
I feel like podcasts have simply been overlooked by big media types, and the day is coming where enough power will concentrate and advertisers will only want to give money to networks instead of individual podcasts.
Enjoy the freedom while it lasts. I think 5 years from now, no individuals will be able to make money from it without joining a "network."
It never went away, but it certainly (sadly) got a serious demotion.
The Bugle and the Allusionist are tiny rays of light in these dark times. Podcasting is a simple and honest business: I download an MP3 and maybe listen, they get paid to read some ad copy.
Guess "box sets" is also doing that now everyone streams TV series.
This is completely hidden from the UI by now.
It could be more prominent.
Can you elaborate on this? How are they related?
The episodes are stores and distributed from the podcast host's own server. The podcast app is just an RSS feed reader.
Podcasts are just RSS feeds with a tag that points to an audio file.
RSS and Podcasting have a lot of common lineage with the guys who invented blogging. As that Wikipedia page states, the enclosure tag was added by Dave Winer, of Scripting News, which is the oldest continuously operated blog...arguably dating back to 1994.