(no subject)

[annathyst]

Great idea of the day for anyone who works for a courier company (UPS/Fedex/etc):

Allow users to set up accounts on your site. Allow users to enter tracking numbers for packages they are interested in. Generate per-user RSS feeds for those packages.

Comments

[duaiwe.livejournal.com]

Even better.. have the system automagically setup an RSS feed for packages sent to or from their listed address.

[bradzoid.livejournal.com]

They need to learn how to deliver packages first ;)

[pointy111.livejournal.com]

UPS==owned.

[diziara.livejournal.com]

UPS has at least the first two thirds of that going. I'd imagine I could find a suggestion email address somewhere or something. But that's a cool idea. ^_^

[summerrose.livejournal.com]

What I do like about the UPS website is that you can track packages without having to sign up for an account on their site.

[annathyst]

I'm not proposing to get rid of that functionality.

My proposed use case is this:

- I sign up for an account with, say, UPS.
- I add the RSS feed, say, http://www.ups.com/users/teferi/packages.xml to my aggregator.
- When I get the tracking number for a package, I log in to UPS's website and add that package to the list of packages I'm interested in.
- UPS provides status updates to all the packages I'm interested in via RSS (clearing packages after they're delivered, of course)

I think this works better than per-package RSS feeds, because it means I don't have to add a new feed every time I'm concerned with a new package.