eBay Ditching Email Announcements... Tells People Via Email

from the hmm dept

Everyone's trying to come up with ways to avoid the phishing problem, and it appears that eBay's plan is to push messages to a special "message center" for users on their website -- thus avoiding the need to use email. Of course, that only works if the user actually checks the message center, so it loses some of the "push" advantages of email. Amusingly, as Broadband Reports notes, the announcement of this change was sent out... via email. Of course, eBay could also use RSS for something like this, but it would require an RSS reader that could do private RSS feeds and more people who are actually willing to use RSS.
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  • identicon
    BtG, 20 Dec 2004 @ 2:58am

    No Subject Given

    and so far, most of the messages are spam like adverts telling you about the great gifts and stocking stuffers you can buy on eBay -- most folks I know have already deleted that region from their MyEbay pages.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Michael Armstrong, 20 Dec 2004 @ 6:50am

    No Special RSS Reader Required


    It really helps to think of RSS feeds as just funny-looking Web pages. With that in mind, just generate a custom RSS feed on a per-request basis.
    Each user would get a special URL, available via their "My eBay" page. Then the Web servers (or RSS server(s)) would generate the feed each time the reader refreshes the feed.
    From the programming side, it's as easy as generating a single RSS feed in the first place.
    It's not without pitfalls by things like people who set their readers to refresh every 5 seconds.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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