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4:18:32 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

How We All Lost $500,000 or "The True Costs of Echo"

I was just thinking over the whole Echo / New RSS format issues and here's what I thought:

1. There's no way that RSS .9x / 2.0 is going away.  It is too entrenched and will just be around for a long time.  Think of it as "the ASCII of syndication".  So every vendor that is involved in Syndication will have to support it. Maybe completely new vendors can escape it but anyone who sells a product or provides a service that does RSS now will have to support it for the indefinite future.  Say 3 more years at least.
   
2. Let's say that there are 50 vendors out there that support RSS and now also need to support echo.  Let's also take an arbitrary cost estimate to the vendor of $10,000.  Assuming a fully loaded cost of $100 / hour for a software engineer to do the implementation, document it, etc, that's only 100 hours of labor or 2.5 weeks.  And that just isn't that much time when you come down to it.  Sure I did my first RSS implementation for Feedster in less than a day but after bug fixes?  I'm probably every bit of that.  Now this could be high or could be low but let's assume that it is good. 
   
3. That means the cost of Echo is $500,000*.   

Hm.... That $500,000 could do quite a bit of good in the world.  It could give Dave Jacobs a new kidney.  Or it could do a lot of other good.  So the question that comes to mind is this:

Is Echo Worth $500,000 ?

*And don't forget that we all still have to pay for supporting existing RSS, fixing bugs, adapting it to new conventions, etc. 

4:09:47 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Tres Cool: Segway to Gnomedex!

Wow.  Very cool.  I can maybe play with a Segway when I get to Gnomedex.  Thanks Chris!

3:44:27 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Dear Ken ... About RSS Search Results ...

I saw via Dave that Ken Tompkins needs search results via RSS.  Well Ken Feedster has had that since day 1 (actually day 3 since it took Brent to suggest it but its been available pretty much forever).

http://feedster.com/search.php?q=feedster&;sort=date

Just click on the RSS icon at the top of the result list and you can use that URL in your aggregator.

2:30:59 PM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

Welcome to Whackamole !

Good morning all.  Nice to be back.  Francois and I are gearing up to turn on the new Feedster search engine sometime in the next few days so I'm busy at work benchmarking and it really is pointing out to me the nature of performance work -- the whackamole !  That's right -- performance work is just like a game of whackamole.  The new engine is actually pretty rippingly fast -- I'm seeing average query benchmarks of .20 seconds once indices are in RAM.  But I'm not seeing that as an end user -- so there's either something wrong in my benchmarking code (unlikely since I'm using the PHP Pear timer object) or its a slowdown somewhere else in the system.  So I'm now playing "Performance Whackamole; Find the Delay and take the prize!".

Sigh.

11:50:01 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This