Despite its best efforts, the email inbox tends to be a clutter of relatively undifferentiated content. It’s easy to lose emails, hard to find them again later and prioritizing which messages to read is awkward to automate.

Enter RSS, a much more sophisticated and intuitive means of communicating. One of the primary advantages of RSS over email is its ability to easily create distinct channels. For example, any of the following can easily be created as an RSS feed:

• Regular project updates from a particular team.
• Announcements from corporate leadership.
• Mentions of the company in news media large or small.
• Articles found online that a selected coworker wants to share with you.
• Items in your email inbox regarding any word or phrase of interest.

These feeds can be grouped, ordered, added to or deleted with very few clicks. Advantages over email include:

• When most of your general information sharing is done via RSS, your email inbox will be much easier to read.
• Out-going feed content can be changed after posting. Although archivable for regulatory compliance, an item once changed or removed will no longer appear as initially posted in a feed of active items delivered to subscribers. For example, when hundereds of workers in the Florida Department of Human Services who were unauthorized to recieve such information were accidentally emailed a list of thousands of HIV+ patients this year, there was no getting that list back from their email inboxes. Had the Department been communicating with RSS, only authorized persons could subscribe to a given channel and the list could have been removed from the feed once discovered. Similary, I included this example after my initial post here - something I could not have done with an email newsletter.
• With RSS you need never repeat a search query, just perform it once and subscribe to its results by RSS for the future. The results of each query serve as a unique content channel. They can be aggregated together or set apart for special prioritization.
• Feeds in which every item is of high priority can be displayed by themselves, such as communications from corporate leaders. Feeds with many items of lower general priority, such as general news updates from your industry, can be displayed together. RSS allows for a more powerful means of differentiating messages than simple name recognition in a "from" field or subjectively effective subject lines in an email. If told to view a particular feed separately, you know that members of your team will receive and see every item in that feed - it won’t get lost in cluttered email inboxes.
• RSS allows for greater granularity and flexibility in defining, parsing, moving and combining streams of content. Creating a feed is as simple as naming it. It can be moved at-will to display in aggregate or distinctly, and once created it can be subscribed to by any authorized user. Imagine being able to say to a coworker, or better yet to everyone who is subscribed to your basic communication feed (your blog): "Here’s a feed you can subscribe to and receive all the articles I bookmark publicly as high-value and concerning recruiting at colleges. Since that’s going to be an especially important topic this month, you may want to view it distinct from your other feeds. After this month it will still be of use but might make more sense in a group of bulk recruiting-related feeds. If you want to contribute to that feed yourself, here’s the tag you can use to bookmark an article into it." This system works much better than copying and pasting URLs for articles online and emailing them to people you want to share them with!
• How many emails get sent to people who don’t really want them, simply because it was easier for the sender to select a wide group of recipients? Messages delivered by RSS will only be delivered to recipients who have subscribed to that particular feed. For example, there is no reason to create an email group of project team members, or try to remember team members’ emails in your address book, if you are simply blogging project updates behind the firewall and team members themselves subscribe to the project updates feed. No more asking someone to please remember to add your email to the list of recipients for a particular project either; anyone authorized can subscribe once and receive future updates automatically.
• Feeds that almost never deliver any items can be very valuable. They can be set to display themselves apart from busier feeds. A search for your competitor’s name and the words "prototype" or "regulation" may not find any results today, but any such search results in the future may be very valuable to you. Those searches can be subscribed to, set to display apart from your other busier feeds, and then they can be forgotten about. If and when any new items are found by search engines, the results will be immediately delivered to you apart from your other incoming content.

The advantages of RSS over email for many purposes are many fold. Once you employ RSS you will never want to go back to using email as your exclusive means of receiving information.