Tim Bray had this idea, and I must admit, I had the same idea as well, an RSS feed of my financial transactions. I know, it’s most likely a long way off… or is it? While driving home last night I heard a commercial promoting email alerts from a bank. They seemed to be saying you could get sent account information via email. Now, I don’t know what kind of information they are sending, and I hope it’s encryped with PGP/GPG or something, but here’s where it gets interesting. If my bank sends me email with useful data, I can easily parse that data and build it into some sort of RSS feed for my own use. I know, it’s a lot more complex than that, but it’s the start of an idea anyway…
Which brings up another interesting issue. Privacy of RSS feed subscription information. Many people share their subscription file on their sites, which is a good idea, and does neat things, but I found when I did this, I first had to delete a feed, not because of a privacy concern, but because it was a resource that could not be reached by the world, and internal project server. So, I’d propose the following to the aggregator makers, add a way for a feed to be marked as private, so that when I export out my file, it can provide me with a list of public feeds that you subscribe to. It would also be useful for people wishing to avoid the embarrasing “You subscribe to what feed?” question…
