Yakov Shafranovich has written a great article at XML.com about tracking packages with RSS.

“Now imagine if you were buying things from eBay, or doing your holiday shopping at Amazon: you might be expecting multiple or urgent packages, and I can bet that most of us will be tracking them pretty often, just like those favorite websites of ours. But if RSS works for website updates, why not serve up tracking information packages in a ready-to-eat RSS feed as well?”

Yakov created the track2rss project to answer that question. Currently, the track2rss project supports FedEx, UPS and USPS, with DHL USA support coming soon. Using the API that each service makes available, track2rss uses XSLT to transform the data returned from the respective service into RSS.

I think this project is a perfect use for RSS. I am glad to see that independent developers are taking charge and filling in the gaps when it comes to adoption of RSS. Had Yakov not created track2rss, how long would it have been before UPS, FedEx, or USPS added their own support for tracking via RSS?

Via XML.com