It's The Customer — not the company — Who Controls The Conversation

"...the elephant in the room: RSS. While INBOX wrestles with the intractable problems of blurred international boundaries, too-complex authentication solutions and too-expensive computational and payment schemes, more and more of us are routing around e-mail for all but the most basic services. IM for supply-chain communications, social networks for collaboration spaces, and RSS as the glue that ties these data points together. This real-time services fabric is that deadliest of competitors to e-mail: It shifts attention slowly and surely away from a producer-consumer economy to a publisher-subscriber ecology. Publishers use transparency to establish credibility, then trade that authority for a reliable connection with their customers. In this new context, the customer--not the company--controls the conversation. Or to paraphrase Anthony Lye, RSS is the property of individuals, not companies."