Web Feed - Benefits

Benefits

Web feeds have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via an email:

• Users do not disclose their email address when subscribing to a feed and so are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• Users do not have to send an unsubscribe request to stop receiving news. They simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically sorted in that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box where messages must be sorted by user-defined rules and pattern matching).

In its explanation "What is a web feed?", the publishing group of Nature describes two benefits of web feeds:

1. It makes it easier for users to keep track of our content...This is a very convenient way of staying up to date with the content of a large number of sites.
2. It makes it easier for other websites to link to our content. Because RSS feeds can easily be read by computers, it's also easy for webmasters to configure their sites so that the latest headlines from another site's RSS feed are embedded into their own pages, and updated automatically.