Comments for Notifixious' Superfeeder: Getting Closer to the Real-Time Web

Notifixious' Superfeeder: Getting Closer to the Real-Time Web

2009-01-29T18:49:49Z

RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.

]]> To tackle these issues, Notifixious is now building its own 'superfeeder,' which it hopes will be able to overcome some of these problems. The company is also planning to make these updates available to the community by providing access to its own real-time XMPP notifications and SUP feeds to third-party developers in the future.

Pull: RSS

Traditionally, RSS readers pull feeds at a regular interval (usually somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes). In a real-time world, that, of course, is far too slow. Services like FeedBurner introduce even more lag into this system, so that it can often take half an hour or longer before a new post appears in Google Reader. Notifixious itself polls every feed about twice an hour.

Pull Smarter

Thanks to FriendFeed's new Simple Update Protocol (SUP), some of the heavy lifting of regularly polling thousands of RSS feeds can be reduced, but as of now, only a small number of services actually support this new protocol. Notifixous also monitors the public activity of ping servers, similar to what PubSub is doing with its new (though still unreleased) product.

Push: XMPP

Currently, Notifixious can only get 'real' real-time updates through XMPP from Identica, Seesmic, LiveJournal, and Sixapart's TypePad and Vox blogging communities. Genestoux notes that he would like to see every content provider use XMPP in the future.

Giving Back: Can Notifixious Replace Gnip's Abandoned XMPP Project?

Maybe the most exciting idea here, however, is that Notifixious plans to share an XMPP and SUP feed with the rest of the community. Gnip, of course, at one point promised to do something very similar, but, in the end, pulled the plug on this project.

Other companies like ZapTXT or Pingie offer a similar service - though we have also seen far too many promising services like Rasasa or Immidi.at close before they could ever live up to their promises. Our experience with these services has been quite mixed, however. We will have to wait and see if Notifixious can deliver on its promise.

Notifixious' Service Right Now

As for the Notifixious service itself, the company will send its updates to your cell phone, IM account, or email address. You can sign up for feeds individually, or import an OPML file.

If you want to send your own real-time updates from your blog to Notifixious, you can use the company's plugins and widgets for TypePad, Vox, Blogger, MovableType, and self-hosted Wordpress sites.

Comment from Chris on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T19:36:27Z

Google Reader does a fine enough job of pulling my feeds. It may not be "real-time" but none of the content in these feeds is really time-sensitive anyway.

I don't think I'd even notice the difference, unless I had them side by side.

Comment from Lindsey on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T19:48:57Z

Traditionally, RSS readers pull feeds at a regular interval (usually somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes). In a real-time world, that, of course, is far too slow.

If you needed real-time updates, why don't you use an pervasive and already-existing mechanism like email, a pager, SMS, etc?

Comment from rick on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T20:18:06Z

You left the most important point out - what's the real need for realtime? yeah, yeah, I get it...we're on he cutting edge, blah blah blah... But really - what's the actual, real world case for sub 15 minute or even sub 30 minute notifications of news?

Of the thousands if items that hit my reader each week I can't think of one where a 30 minute or even 2 hour delay would have mattered. I'm sure there are niches (stock/commodities/etc trading) but those have special purpose solutions. Are there general use cases that really need this? Or is this a solution in search of a problem>

Comment from Darren on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T20:22:58Z

Gnip pushes by the way.

There is an update coming to their platform that will make it very useful. I do believe they are going to offer rss notifications at some point, which would compete with this.

I think RIA's are the way forward for real time rss features.

Comment from Chris A. on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T21:15:30Z

Notifixio.us is useless. I know and I've seen the French dude walking around events and parties to promote his business. He's so arrogant. There's nothing interesting about him or his website. Such a waste of time for everyone.

Comment from Vlad Trifa on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T21:39:00Z

Well, I'm not so sure about this Website and how good it is. My real concern is that for sure a push protocol for the Web is needed, however, it would require a new way to think about the Internet and his client/server architecture. If everything (and I really mean real world objects) would be connected to the internet then they would all need to be both client AND servers, and in this case, we could very well use ATOMPub to push data to subscribers in real-time. I'm very interested in doing so on using very lightweight messaging methods (xmpp is too heavy already, so I'm thinking more of IBM's MQTT, which is less "open" and web oriented), so that even small embedded devices (my fridge, my plants, my lamp, etc) could become a full part of the Web. If you have any infos on such lightweight messaging, please contact me, I'm totally curious. By the way, this is my current research topic, so I'm definitely looking into the evolution of this real-time web.

Keep in mind that the future of the real-time web, is not just about real-time documents, but about the whole real world around us!

Comment from Julien on 2009-01-29

2009-01-29T22:24:15Z

Thanks guys for all the comment. I think real-time is more than just a "feature", it's also a way to consume the information more efficiently : instead of piling up "events", why not catching them on the fly (or letting them pass)? Isn't that what we try to do with Zero inbox?

Comment from arif on 2009-01-29

2009-01-30T03:48:10Z

I don't know about this push/pull mumbojumbo, but the rss notification updates via email etc are being done by others, but with couple of failed efforts (sendmerss, rssfwd etc). The one who is still standing is the zaptxt (which seems more similar to above mentioned service).

Comment from Corvida on 2009-01-30

2009-01-30T23:35:14Z

"RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality."

Comment from Eric Marcoullier on 2009-02-01

2009-02-01T19:40:05Z

Frederic, you've been chatting with Marshall, haven't you.

While we love the hobbyist community bunches, we're still a small startup that has to focus resources where we think dollars are likely to follow. We have yet to have a single company say they would pay us if only we supported XMPP. No one who could pay has even asked about it.

Rest-based push is known and fairly bulletproof. Anyone who can set up their own XMPP server (as opposed to drafting off public servers, which are throttled the moment they get noticeable traffic) can set up their own server and listen to a specific endpoint.

If someone wants to ignore all of the data sources we provide (as well as the extra hundred or so scheduled by the end of Q2) because we don't support a new sexy protocol, that's their choice. If they change their mind at some point, we'll happily push to them in realtime with boring old REST :)

As always, though, thanks a ton for the mention. We think that Julien and Notifixious are pretty cool and enjoy chatting with him about XMPP on a regular basis. Being included in an article about Notifixious is pretty rad.