RSS as the mobile "killer app"

I read Paul's NFC proximity sensing in shops post, in which he mentions the possibility of shops providing their latest offers via an RSS feed. This got me thinking about Lidl's weekly specials and how it would be cool to get them as an RSS feed in my new LiteFeeds mobile aggregator. A quick Google search yielded RSSxl - Convert an HTML Web Page to RSS which has a handy form for - you guessed it - generating RSS from HTML. In about 5 minutes I had a feed that lists each special (with a link to the product page) in the title and the price listed in the description of each item.

Now I'd like to be able to say that I added the feed to my LiteFeeds account and the rest was history - handy notifications of Lidl's weekly specials in my mobile aggregator. But that's not quite true. The generated feed doesn't actually work in LiteFeeds (I'm not sure why) and besides this is a rather brittle hack. (Although I prefer LiteFeeds, my generated feed worked fine with Bloglines mobile.)

I think the exercise illustrates an important point though. With fairly little effort, I was able to make use of readily available information and tools to get notifications of interest to me, on my mobile phone. No premium rate text messages and no need to browse the full HTML site with the limited resources of a phone. Now the question is: why aren't Lidl already providing their specials as an RSS feed (instead of an email newsletter)? And what about the recruitment sites and the property letting and sales sites and, and... Surely the obvious thing for them is to offer highly personalised feeds of jobs and properties and weather reports and DART times and ... the list is endless. Feeds that people could aggregate on their mobiles allowing them to get all their notifications in one convenient place.