March 25, 2009

RSS or Newsletter?

One question that I ear a lot on some websites is: Should I subscribe to the RSS Feed or should I receive newsletter e-mails from the website?
So, I decided to give you an idea of what to choose.

If you go for the rss feed the best feature you'll get is the Share feature, if you're using Google Reader or other RSS Reader that may have Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. integration, so that you can easily share your favourite posts with you friends. Besides all other simple, but useful, features that you may get is the "live" view ( so, I decided to call it live view! ), you just see the full post directly from your browser and there's no need of saving or taking up precious disk space.
My favourite RSS Reader is Google Reader, as you may noticed already, since it runs from the browser and has many features and uses your Google Account. It's also very easy to set up and start running.
The disadvantage of using RSS is that for active blogs like CNN or BCC... if you don't read the posts regularly, after a week your "inbox" will be so full of posts that you don't want to start from the last one and work your way to the top and just mark all of them as read, which isn't very intelligent but it's what people do. And there isn't an actual way of saving the post itself for the HD correctly which doesn't matter for most people but for some it does.

If you go for the Newsletter the advantage is that you get your fresh posts directly to your mailbox in a nice, clean and easy way to read. You can also save the post to your HD preserving it's nice format. It's also simple to set up
The disadvantage is that you can't easily share the post with your friend on Twitter... and that it may get your inbox full which may cause the mail server to start recognizing the newsletter mails as spam.

So, I prefer the newsletter. But RSS is more common since it came first and it's very easy to set up.

This is just my opinion, if you disagree, please leave a comment to tell us what do you think and which one is your favourite.