Re: more on the simplified feed format

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Do you realize how ridiculously expensive this is? I
> have users with hundreds of feeds and the thought of
> performing a few dozen GET requests for a single feed
> (e.g. if you are subscribed to Robert Scoble's feed)
> is impractical.

Given the range of features ASP.NET offers and it's caching I'd think this would
hardly put a dent in it's performance.  Really, encouraging this sort of thing
would likely /help/ promote it.

> As it is I already have gotten less and less use from
> feeds that don't provide full content (e.g. I've
> almost stopped reading Tim Bray's feed bacuase he only
> includes the first paragraph in the feed and its
> rarely interesting enough to hook me into launching
> the browser to go to his page and I'm not the only one
> I know who's mentioned this) let alone going to the
> extreme of providing no content. I don't see how this
> is beneficial to either content producers or
> consumers.

What's worse here, abstracts devoid of enough interesting content to invite your
visit?  Or wasted bandwidth of full content that likewise doesn't raise
interest?  Place the blame where it lies, if the content is good and the
abstracts in the feed suck then blame the feed.  Then there's other edge cases
like Croome's feed to show just how horrible full content can be.  480k for
newsfeed is ridiculous.  Made doubly-so by lacking any sort of partial delivery
(not to mention failing to use gzip delivery)

What would be beneficial is for aggregator programs to get smarter about using
resources.  There are plenty of ways the programs can be clever about caching
and preloading content.  Newzcrawler does the best job of this I've seen.

This'd be a better use of resources than just copping out and dumping it all
into one huge-ass document.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com