[spicybright]

Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS is worth it for emergency alerts.

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.