Robert Scoble announced this morning:
RSS is broken, is what happened. It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes (default aggregator behavior is to pull down a feed every hour).
Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS.
He goes on to describe what actions MSDN is taking to "lighten" their feeds. Then
the conversation really heats up.
This is a repeated theme that we've been hearing
more and
more lately.
Is the sky really falling for RSS? Or just for the big guys, who'll need to push thousands of feeds at a time?
Obviously, if this sort of bottleneck hampers adoption of RSS, everyone, big and small alike, will pay the price.
1. Harold, I've been reading folks picking up on Scoble's post all day. It occurs to me that a properly configured RSS aggregator only grabs each post one time.
So while I see congestion created by broad adoption of RSS posssibly creating an issue, my aggregator (NewsGator in Outlook) only actually pulls information when new content is posted. The query ping to an XML feed URL can't be that much of a resource hog can it?
The responsible thing to do is address this in the software by setting the default to only pull a post one time. I manually turn off the "Treat modified posts as new" option in NewsGator when I subscribe to new feeds so I'm not reacquiring every post that has a small addition or typographic correction applied. I wish it could be set as a default.
Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Marc Orchant