(2003-05-25) Rss Aggregator Server

Mikel Maron on the challenges of building a central RssAggregator service (for the Average Joe who doesn't want to download software). A couple thoughts:

• the Average Joe may have much lower expectations of control, and much lower frequency of usage, so maybe lots of Personalization isn't really necessary.

  • just personalize his list of subscribed feeds, list in order of last-mod-date, then let him click to see the last n items from that feed.

• part of the complexity of doing scalable fancy stuff is the Business Model, so maybe it can be done but not for free (though that begs the question of whether Average Joe will pay for such a service).

• maybe the Publish And Subscribe model should be much different from that - maybe it should be something like blogs generating daily EMail updates to subscribers. Or a central service generating the emails - this still has the advantage over a pull-method that latency isn't an issue and demand can be spread out. On the other hand, this approach generates lots of emails that will never get read (because people never unsub).