Private Syndication

Over at the ZD BTL space, David Berlind writes good stuff on something I’ve been talking about for a long time, private syndication feeds. My favorite examples have been feeds from my bank account or credit card or stock portfolio, but David has another for people like EBay, who can no longer email their customers because everyone receiving such an email assumes it’s a phishing attempt (it usually is). David wonders if existing RSS-based systems can scale up for mass one-to-one usage; the answer is “yes, obviously”; post-and-poll (as in syndication) is mechanically simpler than store-and-forward (as in email), it’ll scale just fine. One detail: I think that for this kind of content-critical, all-business feed, Atom is a more attractive choice than any of the RSS flavors.