I've always felt that Google Reader held RSS back by not supporting feed authentication. It was the defacto reader when RSS was growing, so what it supported defined what was possible with RSS.
Feed authentication would allow for a variety of potential services business models.
- Paywalls: Whether subscribing to a newspaper to supporting a blog through
Patreon, it lets user directly pay for content provided through RSS.
- Customized curation services: Whether manually curated by an editor, or
using algorithms, you could build a business around providing content to
individual users.
- Social network integration: Instead of joining one or two massive Social
networks, I could be involved in dozens of small, focused ones, all
collected in a single RSS reader.
I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. But for it to be useful, it
has to be available and easy to use in all the major RSS platforms.
Programming languages have evolved around the keys present on the QWERTY keyboard. It would be interesting to develop a programmers keyboard geared at providing more useful symbols for programming, and then write languages around the new keyboard.
When not programming, many of the symbols on the QWERTY keyboard are useless, and it's missing a lot of typographic symbols that I end up having to use shortcuts, character maps, or unicode for. It doesn't even have a real apostrophe or left and right quotes, let alone en and em dashes, bullets, or various space widths.
I often think that Google Reader was the worst thing to happen to RSS. It became the standard everyone used, but never implemented feed authentication, forever preventing the idea of premium subscription feeds from succeeding.
With all the complaints about page weight, tracking, and overzealous advertising, the idea that I could just pay to subscribe to an RSS feed has more appeal than ever.
It's important to note that, according to the chart, both are on the decline. Auto deaths are simply declining further.
Gun ownership is an important civil liberty in the USA, but one that comes with danger.
The Economist is recommending a technological approach to mitigating that danger. Research and development has been done in this department, and many technologies have been applied to modern firearms. Better safeties that prevent accidental discharge, better safes, ammunition that prevents over-penetration, etc.
We have yet to see a simple and trustworthy technology that limits who can fire a gun. When we do, it will start to be used.
For such a technology to work, the user needs to feel in complete control of it. There can be zero risk that an authorized user won't be able to fire the gun due to system failure or low battery.
Ultimately, though, no technological solution will prevent suicide. For that, a different approach will be necessary, and I don't have an answer for that.
Feed authentication would allow for a variety of potential services business models.
I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. But for it to be useful, it has to be available and easy to use in all the major RSS platforms.