Usability of email as RSS

In his latest Alertbox Jakob Nielsen discusses usability issues of newsletters sent through email and news in RSS feeds.

One thing I missed was the option of reading newsletters and RSS feeds with the same application. In the article, newsletters sent as email and news distributed with RSS are discussed as two separate things. But email programs can handle RSS feeds, and there are RSS readers that can handle email. With these tools the user has a single way to handle both types of information, independent from the distribution format.

I prefer to read news in a collected form with stories from multiple sources. I use Bloglines for this and one of the sources is the Alertbox newsletter. Now to me this newsletter is no longer an email but one article among many, and with that change comes a change in attention span and impact.

Now the newsletter doesn't contain the full story, but a summary plus a link to the article on the website. Good for people who want to read articles on the originating website, but I don't need that. So to get the full article I need to perform an extra action, follow the link. So, to me it would be an improvement if the complete article was available in the newsletter.

What publishers could do to satisfy the needs of different users is to give users a choice when they subscribe. A choice of the contents, complete articles or a link to the website. And a choice of the distribution format, email or RSS. That would give users the freedom to get the information they want delivered the way they want it.