More on RSS and Bandwidth Woes.

The RSS bandwidth troubles that Robert Scoble reported last week have reverberated through the community and many, many voices have decided to weigh in. Here’s a sampling:

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress:

I don’t care if an aggregator checks my feed every 5 minutes, if they support HTTP properly (last-modified headers) the load is neglible for me and them. The bandwidth used each time is around 250 bytes.

Greg Reinacker of NewsGator:

...most mature aggregators (like NewsGator and NewsGator Online) use the HTTP caching mechanisms, so use them. And further, there are things you can do on the server side to manage the bandwidth load, depending on the goals you have for your feed.

Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft:

If you are running a popular web site, you will need to spend money to afford the traffic. AOL.com, Ebay.com and Microsoft.com are all serving terrabytes of content each month. If they were serving these with the same budget that I have for serving my website these sites would roll over and die. Does this mean we should replace using web browsers and HTTP for browsing the Web and resort to using BitTorrent for fetching HTML pages? It definitely would reduce the bandwidth costs of sites like AOL.com, Ebay.com and Microsoft.com.

Werner Vogels of Amazon: 

For those who are surprised by the bandwidth problems that the polling of RSS feeds is causing the MS folks, let me say it once more:

UNCONTROLLED POLLING OF RESOURCES DOES NOT SCALE!!

20 years of developing distributed systems have thought us this, but the RSS advocates appear deaf for these issues. The simple approach that works well with small feeds and limited number of subscribers does not work with large feeds and many subscribers.

Sam Ruby of IBM:

Another bandwidth reduction idea, compliments of FooCamp04.

This idea doesn’t require coordination between vendors, and leverages the ETag support that is present in many existing aggregator clients.  It is complicated to explain, and would be complicated to implement, but the end result would take the form of an Apache Module (and/or IIS filter) that sysadmins of major sites could just “drop in”.

It’s so great to see that we’ve got a consensus. I think we can finally put the whole Atom vs. RSS controversy to rest. We’ve got something better…

[The RSS Weblog]

9:09:50 PM

categories: Radio Fun

 

Web monitoring and management services provider Keynote Systems on Friday announced its intent to acquire Web-based customer research firm Vividence for $20 million in cash, and another $6 million possible over the next year based on performance targets.

Keynote has already done two acquisitions in the customer experience management (CEM) space when it acquired Enviz in October 2002 and NetRaker in 2004. With the addition of Vividence, the company expects to own 80 percent of the CEM market.
[more]