Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Ketchup_blade writes "As RSS is becoming more known to the mainstream users and press, the bandwidth issue reported by many sites (Eweek, CNet, InternetNews) related to feeds is becoming a reality. Stats from sites like Boing Boing are showing a real concern regarding feeds bandwidth usage. Possible solutions to this problem are emerging slowly, like RSScache (feed caching proxy) and KnowNow (even-driven syndication). RSScache seems to offer a realistic solution to the problem, but can this be enough to help RSS as it reaches an even bigger user base in the upcoming year?"

Comments

Push

[Phroggy]

Remember all the hype about "push" technology back in the mid-nineties? Nobody was interested, but RSS feeds are being used in much the same way now. I'm thinking there are two significant differences: 1) with RSS, the user feels like they're in control of what's going on; with push, users felt like they were at the mercy of whatever money-grabbing corporations wanted to throw at them, and 2) a hell of a lot of people now have an always-on Internet connection with plenty of bandwidth to spare. When you've got a 33.6kbps dialup connection, you use the Internet differently than when you've got DSL or cable.

How much bandwidth does Slashdot's RSS feed use?

It looks like the RSS feed on my home page has a small handful of subscribers. Neat.

Re:Push

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointcast sent way too much data at the time, and now we all have orders of magintude more bandwidth.

Most of the problem come from a few older RSS readers that don't support Conditional GET, gzip, etc. With modern readers, there's essentially no problem (I've measured it on a few sites I run). Yes, they poll every hour or two, but the bandwidth is a tiny, tiny fraction of what we get from say, putting up a small QuickTime.

There seem to be lots of people who freak out way to quickly about a few bytes. RSS sends to unnecessary data, but if you've configured things correctly, it's much smaller than lots of other things we do on our networks...

They just need to follow ./'s lead

[Neil Blender]

And institute jackboot banning policies if you access them more than x times per y hours.

Doomed? It's barely got off the ground...

[WIAKywbfatw]

What you're seeing right now are teething troubles. Nothing more, nothing less. The bandwidth and consumption experienced right now will be laughed off a couple of years from now as miniscule.

Take the BBC News website for example. On September 11th 2001 its traffic was way beyond anything it had experienced to that point. Within a year or so, it was comfortably serving more requests and seeing more traffic every day. Proof if it was needed that capacity isn't the issue when it comes to Internet growth, and won't be for the foreseeable future.

RSS is in its infancy. Just because people didn't anticipate it being adopted as fast as it has been that doesn't make it "doomed". By that rationale, the Internet itself, DVDs, digital photography, etc are all "doomed" too.