MSDN Shuts off RSS Feeds
Scoble: "RSS is broken."
Nu-uh.
RSS is a document format. How MS implemented it is what is broken (not a shot against Microsoft, most people are implementing RSS in a really non-scalable way.)
Was there any sort of frequency or rate limiting put in place? Distributed service? Authentication requirements? Traffic shaping? Caching?
Implementors need to wrap their head around the fact that they just can't turn on RSS in a large scale environment and expect to see the same behavior that they see with regular HTML docs. They should be expecting to see the same behavior that they see from highly popular HTML docs and implement it in such a way that it works in their environment.
RSS isn't broken at all - just how we treat it.
See this post as it first appeared on Blogware.
2 comments
Comments are closed - these are kept exactly as they were left.
(name not saved), September 8, 2004
One major difference is that RSS traffic is "sticky". Once someone arrives, they never leave!
(name not saved), September 9, 2004
Precisely - but content providers have long been looky at the problems associated with sticky content. Innovations like Akamai's distributed caching network, for instance, came out of examining this type of a problem.
But that doesn't mean that HTML is borked - just the opposite in fact! It works *too* good!