What’s wrong with RSS
January 5th, 2006
RSS is quite interesting, but suffer from a lot of issues, and I start to be a little fed up to heard only one voice, the one that promote the usage of RSS as the only ubiquitous communication form: could be used to deliver email, download code, etc….I even read some proposal to use RSS to notify of presence, location, etc…
Some solution emerges. For example, RSS aggregators can be “pinged” by RSS issuers, to notify that the RSS stream has been updated. And if you subscribe to an aggregator (like Google reader) that he must be able to optimize update for his subscribers. Nice, but this solves only the issue for the aggregator, and not if you want to have a direction connection with the feed.
So, the current architecture of RSS force you to check very frequently the RSS feeds to get real time update of something. That’s a complete technical non sense: that’s fine if you do a daily, or eventually a hourly check. But if you build an IM client on top of this, than the network load will be huge for very few information.
What is missing is a real subscription mechanism, where you can subscribe to a feed, and get notified of the update of this feed. From a practical point of view, it’s like receiving an email, or an SMS, or being “pinged” when a feed is updated, this would be a good next step.
So before such solution emerge, be caution and do not use RSS to try to solve all your subscription/update problems….
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized
– Eric Cubizolle
1 Comment Add your own
1. eduadr | January 5th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
About a year ago I wrote an application (zaptxt.com) that tries to solve the problems you described in your blog. I had similar issues with RSS and I was tired of refreshing my RSS feeds every hour or so in order to see if there were any updates. So, I decided to write a program that would check my RSS feeds every so often and notify me via email or SMS (or both) if the feeds were updated. My main concern was to make the application as flexible as possible. I wanted to be able to control the flow of the RSS data. For example, I can indicate that I only want SMS alerts if a new RSS post contains certain keywords/phrases and only between 8AM and 10PM. (I don’t want my phone to beep at night.) I store all the new RSS posts that meet my search criteria but only send them out during the specified time.
This filtering mechanism was very important for me to prevent information overload. I only wanted updates for “important” posts, not every single update. I would appreciate if you could check out zaptxt.com and let me know what you think.
eduard
zaptxt.com
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