This post will go nowhere, and has no point.  In a blatant case of “blogging for myself“, I'm thinking out loud for my own reference.

After a brief email conversation with Kent Tegels a few days ago where he discussed his liking the “push” aspect of SMTP, and the “pull” aspect of RSS, I got to wondering - what really makes these push or pull?

Let's boil down email.  One user (say, Alice) sends another user (Bob) an email.  She writes it, and sends it to a server.  Bob then runs software (email client) to pull that content from the server and read it. 

Now RSS/Atom/RDF.  One user (Gary) writes content, and sends it to a server.  Another user (Danielle) then runs software (aggregator) to pull that content from the server and read it.

Okay, so those sound very similar.  The difference? Well, one big difference is that with email, you are selecting one user to receive the content.  With RSS, a user selects one writer to pull the content from.

So really, we have two “pull“ technologies...  One allows anyone to read, but only one to post.  The other allows only one to read, but many to post.. With email, we know that Bob will probably pull his feed regularly, and possibly post to mine.  With blog-type feeds we know that Gary will probably write to his feed regularly, but he has know idea if or when someone will read it.

With such a similar yet reciprical model, I'm wondering how long until we have unification.  I mean, lets face it, SMTP is broken.  But it will be slow (and I mean slow) to change because of the huge investment in it.  Depending on who you ask, RSS is broken - or at least it needs changing... but it can be (and is now) changed before investments in it are overwhelming.  

I'm looking forward to unification.  I hate the amount of different information channels I need to manage (email, rss, nntp, website forums, phone calls) .  Can't a guy just get one?