Thursday, August 7, 2008

RSS feeds, and the ridiculousness of the update frequency

I'll admit I'm not an expert at RSS and I haven't read the ISO doc or anything like that. But what I can say about RSS feeds is that its ridiculously slow to update.

Are some of the servers providing RSS feeds on a 2400 baud modem? Is that the problem?

We're at an age where we no longer should have to wait for anything if we don't have to. How about a RSS relaying service for something like iGoogle? For example, say you have a popular rss feed, and you don't want a million people that have added the rss feed to iGoogle (Google's news aggregator) to request from your server with limited bandwidth. So instead, Google's rss relay service checks your rss feed every minute, and when people update their iGoogle page, it displays what Google's last update was.

Maybe they are already doing that. And if that's the case, there is no excuse for slow updating RSS feeds. A slow updatting RSS feed is as good as day old newspaper.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree! I've been working on a blog for awhile now, and finally thought I would add some 'gadgets' that make use of the blogger rss feed.

    Well it works I guess, but how often does it update? wtf! I wait hours sometimes and it still hasnt updated, as you stated it is rediculous! I tried redirecting the feed through feedburner which slowed the updated even further! I guess I always thought of these rss feeds as being 'instant news' but it really isnt, again as you stated it is "as good as day old news" at this speed...

    It is strange that it should update so slow, when the data being transmitted is so small, 512KB max I believe. Why can't we have our cake and eat it too!!

    peace!

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