Slashdot Mirror
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?"
rsstorrent -- distributed rss,echoing bittorrent?
Instead of downloading the entire RSS feed every time, why not have aggregators indicate to the server the timestamp of the last time the RSS feed was downloaded, or the timestamp of the last item in the feed the aggregator knows about, and then the server can dynamically generate the RSS with only new content for that client. Increases processing load while reducing bandwidth, but processing time is what most servers have lots of, not to mention it's far cheaper to increase than bandwidth.
RSS feeds are meant as a way to strip all the nonsense from a site and offer easy syndication, right? Basically, present the relevent news from a full-fledged webpage in a smaller file size? If such is the case, this isn't an RSS issue, really. I see it more as a bandwidth issue. I mean, people are going to get their news one way or the other.. either with a bunch of images and lots of markup via HTML or with just the bare minimum of text and markup via RSS. I would prefer RSS over HTML any day of the week! But perhaps RSS makes syndication TOO simple. Thus everyone does it and that eats additional bandwidth that normally would be reserved for those browsing the HTML a site offers.
And you could implement bans on people who request the RSS feed more than X times per hour as someone suggested (Doesn't /. do this?), but I don't think that gets around the bandwidth issue. I mean, those who want the news will either go with RSS or simply hit the site. Again, RSS is the preferred alternative to HTML.
So here's my suggestion.. go to nothing but RSS and no HTML!
What is your penile percentile?
Create a new first level domain ( like alt, comp, talk etc ) named "rss" and use an extra header to identify the originating rss feed URL. The latter header could be used by the RSS/NNTP reader to select which article bodies to download and to verify each RSS entry to identify fake posts.
This still baffles me. BitTorrent works great for distributing media like ISOs. Folks, it can distribute "little" stuff, too.
A content creator (say Slashdot) has webpages and it has an RSS feed. They create a torrent for each page. They sign the RSS file and each torrent (and its content) with a private key. They post their public key on their homepage.
Now, you can cache the RSS file on other sites that support you yet the users can still be confident that it really came from you. Inside the RSS file, users can try to get the webpage (and all its images, etc.) through the torrent first. When the page loads locally in your browser, it could still go out and get ads if you are an ad sponsored site.
If you are a popular site and have a "fan base", you should have no problem implementing something along these lines. If you are a site that has these problems, you are probably popular and have a fan base. Given the right software and the buy-in from users, the problem solves itself.
Well, RSS was simple, and everything you're talking about (caching, push-based update, etc) are application-level issues. Even though that stuff is defined in HTTP 1.1, it took years for HTTP 1.1 to come out.
If the web started with HTTP 1.1, it would never have gone anywhere because it's too complicated. There are parts of 1.0 that probably aren't implemented very well.
If you want to improve things, adopt an RSS reader project and add those features.