Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to Try
RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour.
A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.
What it Is
The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.
In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:
- RWW: How will it work?
Buchheit: SUP is just a very simple extension to RSS and Atom that makes it easier to discover when a feed has been updated.
- RWW: Where is this relative to XMPP?
Buchheit: It's unrelated to XMPP.
- RWW: Gnip? (See our coverage of Gnip, a startup that appears to be aiming to do what SUP will do and more.)
Buchheit: We're talking with several companies about supporting SUP, but aren't ready to announce anything.
- RWW: Open source?
Buchheit: Yes, absolutely Open Source.
Not a whole lot of information is available about SUP, but we hope the above helps. We're real excited to see what FriendFeed has under its hat. The company has done more interesting things with popular use of RSS than anyone else has in awhile.
The Simple Update Protocol is due to be released next month. We look forward to checking it out. Soggy feeds put a damper on our day far too often. Update: FriendFeed has posted details about this on their blog.
Interested in FriendFeed? Take a tour of the RWW writers' activities on the site here. See also our months-old podcast interview with the founders of FriendFeed, still one of the best sources of in depth information available about this important service.
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Hi Marshall,
Thanks for linking to my story.
FYI, SUP stands for Simple Update Protocol (not Standard).
Cheers,
Mary Kathleen Flynn
Senior Editor/Senior Video Producer
The Deal & Tech Confidential
mflynn@thedeal.com
Thanks Mary, fixed that.
Marshall also check out GetPingd - www.getpingd.com - which allows for advanced subscription models such as HTTP web hooks and XMPP layers on top of RSS/Atom.
I use friend feed to feed all my blog posts to my facebook account. Works great! Haven't seen a single flaw yet.
This seem very interesting, so many great ideas and programs out there, the more I learn, more knowledge I'll gain....www.freebieoffers.net RULE!!!
Same here - the new Facebook lifestreaming feature is super easy to integrate with Friendfeed, and because Friendfeed is so flexible, it allows you to push just about everything you do to your account's stream in near-real time - which is awesome, because Facebook itself only supports a few streaming services right now. Agreed, fantastic feature - any speed that can be built into that funneling is a huge plus for people who are generating and streaming a lot of different content.
FriendFeed, you're doing it wrong. Why use RSS for this at all? Most sites have APIs that provide mechanisms to fetch "new" items. These APIs are typically much more robust than RSS.
There's certainly an argument that it's better to use a standardized API than write custom stuff to talk to each site. But using RSS the way you're using it is really a hack. If you want a standard API for this sort of thing, what you should really be doing is pushing people to adopt something like XMPP pubsub.
"On July 21st, 2008, FriendFeed crawled Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users of which 6,721 of that 45,754 visited Flickr in that 24 hour period, and could have "potentially" uploaded a photo."
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/kellan/beyond-rest (Slide 16)
RSS is simply not going to get us there.
"Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
Gah!
try to use www.alefo.com, alefo has developed an online, web-based application that allows users to create personal homepages easily and efficiently without using RSS feeds.
Creating a widget is a simple and intuitive process wherein the user simply draws a box over the desired area of the source site and confirms the captured area, a process that takes no more than a few seconds. After defining the captured area, the new widget is instantly placed on the user’s homepage where a mash-up of all the widgets appear and can be moved around, arranged and styled as per the user’s preferences.
By clicking a widget or links within a widget, users are instantly taken to the source article or content for further reading.