Today I was browsing the web as usual, when something strange happened – a site wanted me to subscribe to their weekly email. I dismissed it as something strange, since nowadays most people use RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and (God forbid) G+ to distribute their content. But it happened again in the afternoon. And yet again 5 minutes ago. Something is going on.
The Return of the Mailing List
Once we had mailing lists and we received a nice weekly/monthly email with good information. And the good thing is – it happened once a week (not too much); it was passive – you didn’t have to go to your RSS reader/twitter/FB/G+; it was simple.
But the web got faster and faster and a week was too much time for an update. So updates started to come once a day, once an hour, every 10 minutes… OVERLOAD!
I am thinking that The Return of the Mailing List just now is not a coincidence. You surely remember the hideous shutdown of the Google Reader, right? It caused me a LOT of pain, and I am still searching for a good replacement (Feedly is too heavy, The Old Reader is closing down and Digg Reader is missing too many features). I have a HUGE backlog of feeds that I haven’t read… And I guess I am not the only one.
So people are returning to the good old mailing list… Don’t know if this is good or bad, but it is happening.
And in a somewhat related subject, check out The Slow Web movement. I think mailing lists are a way to make the web a bit slower. What do you think?
