Will RSS Readers Clog The Web?
I was sent a link by herb to a story on Wired News: Will
RSS Readers Clog the Web?
. Like, me, some people wonder
if RSS will scale when an RSS aggregator would be embedded in for example
Internet Explorer. Dave
Winer comments that if implemented properly, the check for new
content is an "infinitesimal" burden. That is, using the appropriate HTTP
1.1 headers.
Still, Winer said he would love to work on a solution system when this turns out to be a real problem. He goes on about having a group of aggregator developers to talk about these issues. Well, my gutt feeling is that polling the original content provider every half an hour is inefficient by any standard.
On the other hand, Tim
Bray talks about RSS By
The Numbers
, in which a Dave morse testifies that the
traffic burden on his network went down significantly when he started
syndicating information in RSS feeds. His information hungry customers
can poll the feed for updates every 2.5 minutes, and still use less
bandwidth than fetching the web page once. Provided that they use the
right tools, probably.
I believe that whether you are going to use Jabber pubsub like I said earlier, or some other way of spreading the load, something should be done. Jabber enabled desktop aggregators will probably not be in wide spread use any time soon, but what about feeding RSS mirrors using pubsub?