by Mark on Feb. 7, 2006 @ 10:59 AM

During the last 2-3 days there has been a debate in the blogosphere about why RSS hasn't taken off.
For a summary of the debate and all the relevant posts, check out Debbie Weil's blog.

But in case you don't want to wade through all of the backround, here's a quick summary: AOL and Yahoo! are considering a plan to charge marketers a fraction of a penny to send emails to AOL or Yahoo! users. As a result, dozens of bloggers are wondering -- why hasn't RSS replaced email? (If you don't know what RSS is, check out Bloglines).
Fred Wilson (a VC by day), says that RSS won't take off until it becomes "brain dead simple to use". (I'm now the ten millionth blogger to quote him on that phrase.)

Everyone seems to agree that he's right. RSS is incredibly useful and functional -- it makes the Internet much more powerful. But the concept of RSS is hard to understand, and there's a steep learning curve for the technology. A Yahoo! report from a few months ago says that only 4% of Internet users knowingly use RSS.

Will RSS ever take off? Yes, once we've implemented a few innovations... First, it needs a better name. "RSS" is too techy - we need something simpler, like "email". How about "email2.0"? Who wouldn't want to replace their email with email2.0? And it seems to fit with certain industry trends... (or we could rename it "27emails", but that doesn't seem as intuitive.) And instead of "aggregator", let's use something more friendly: LaunchPad. So my RSS aggregator becomes my email2.0 LaunchPad. Much better.

Now that we've got a better name, we need content. We need to make sure that everything that is currently available via email is also available via email2.0... there seems to be a simple answer: just make it easy to convert your email into an email2.0 feed. Basically, give your email a "redirect" into your LaunchPad. A corollary innovation: within your LaunchPad, have a big fat button to send an email2.0. So from your LaunchPad you can recieve all your mail in a simple feed, and send mail that automatically redirects to the recipient's feed.
What's more, with this set-up you can put filters on your incoming mail and have those filters direct to separate feeds... So within my LaunchPad I would have a Personal Email2.0 feed, a Business Email2.0 feed, etc.

Finally, now that we have all these sweet innovations like better terminology and better functionality, we need mass education. Here's what I propose... there are one billion Internet users. There are probably 10 million of them with a working knowledge of email2.0 (probably less, but let's use that number for simplicity's sake). So if every email2.0 user teaches 100 friends and family members how to switch technologies, we'll be golden. What's the incentive? Each of the 10 million educators gets stock in a new company that makes email2.0 LaunchPads (the Bloglines of the future).

What do you think? We've got an idea and a plan to implement the idea. Viva la email2.0! I expect that this will all take off within 3-5 months. For now, simple RSS will have to do (or rather, complex RSS). For those readers who want to brave the learning curve, trust me: it's worth it.