Imho, Instant Outlining is a workgroup application.
It's going to be hard to write this note without sounding stern, so please understand that I'm smiling while I'm writing this, but am just trying to keep my server from melting down.
First, this is the third or fourth time I've implemented Instant Outlining, depending on how you count.
The first time, it worked spectacularly. Every other time it's gone splat, and not worked.
Here's the primary thing I learned -- Instant Outlining is not like RSS.
In RSS you can subscribe to 100 feeds, no problem. Some people subscribe to 1000 feeds. It's a bit of work to keep up with them, but a human being can do it. But with I/O, the most you can do is four or five. It's a workgroup application, not a global one.
So when I see people encouraging people to subscribe to their outline the way they would encourage people to subscribe to their RSS feed, I think "Oh boy we're headed for a meltdown again."
One of the problems is that I/O polls every minute, and by convention RSS polls every hour.
Another is that RSS is tuned to make it easy for processing programs to find the new stuff, but OPML is designed to transmit the entire status of a project or even worse, a set of projects. This is fantastic for people I work closely with, but totally not workable for broadcasting to hundreds of people. That's why I'm not using my instant outline to manage my work. I don't at this time have a workgroup that I'm part of that uses I/O. I hope to again someday be, it was fantastic (we shipped Radio 8 with it in 2002).
So, if you find that dozens of people are subscribing to your outline, I think you're headed for trouble, largely because they're going to expect you to subscribe to their outlines. But then what have you accomplished? You've just recreated a mail list. Why not just use a mail list? It's much more efficient.
Anyway, I just thought I should share some of this. [support News]
5:16:16 PM 
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