| I mostly agree. But really RSS and email have basically the same functionality. The have date, time, content. The main difference is that RSS has better markup for URL "attachments" as well as an alternate URL. The "what if the email server is overloaded" can be equivalently replaces with "What if the RSS feed is down". Spam is an issue with email, the nice thing about RSS is that you know you want the feed, so spam is almost a non-issue. However I have seen it the other way where my feed reader is blocked because they have "bot protection" on the RSS feed. This can be called a misconfiguration, but it is a common misconfiguration, and there will always be some level of protection on a feed because in the case of DoS you want to try to filter out the attackers. I guess for something this urgent you can configure your reader to alert you on failures to check but that is not even supported by a lot of readers. The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere. The main advantage of email is that it is natively push, so the updates will almost always be faster (greylisting aside...). This can be resolved with WebSub but support for that is very rare. At the end of the day they are both open protocols and you can handle them however you want, although the infrastructure for RSS is probably more inline with this use case. But then again, I read my RSS feeds via email anyways, so I'm probably biased. My proposal? Support both. RSS is trivial to add support for, and if you have an RSS feed you can add a "subscribe by email" form in a couple clicks using existing services. And overall these public alerts are a seriously unsolved problem. When I lived in Dublin, IE there was a water advisory like this and their only notification mechanism was TV+radio. As with most people under the age of 30 I don't frequently listen to TV or radio so could have been drinking contaminated water for days. I was shocked that they didn't send out a cell-based emergency alert for everyone in the area. But even that wouldn't have caught everything. It would be amazing if my city, province and country all had emergency alerts that I could subscribe to via RSS and email. |
I'm willing to bet good money <0.5% of the population even use or are aware of RSS. Supporting it also has a very non-trivial cost. Even if it takes a few hours for an engineer to implement it, it'll need to be added to their testing plan to make sure it's reliable.
Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails.
So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line, so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same way existing emergency systems are.