blogs.msdn.com: RSS consumes too much bandwidth

["Bob Wyman" <bobwyman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

	Robert Scoble notes on his blog[1] that blogs.msdn.com has started
to feed abbreviated entries in order to reduce their bandwidth costs. Scoble
notes: "It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing
to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every
few minutes." He says: "Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's
ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth
were being used up by RSS." Also: "RSS is losing some of its advantages.
More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds."
	This is, of course, not just an issue for RSS. It is an issue for
Atom as well. While polling for RSS/Atom files has been an acceptable
solution to-date, as the popularity of RSS/Atom increases, we're going to
see more and more people with popular feeds get hit with serious bandwidth
bills. Scoble says that this problem isn't just one felt by Microsoft. He
reports, "I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds
because of this issue too."
	My hope is that in the process of defining Atom, we'll be able to
address the bandwidth issue better than it has been addressed in the past.
There a number of things we can consider. One of them is getting people to
use push instead of pull (ala: "Atom over XMPP"[2,3]). There must be other
approaches we can use as well...
	What can we do to ensure that Atom doesn't get swamped by bandwidth
problems?

		bob wyman



[1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/09/08.html#a8195
[2] http://pubsub.com/developers.php
[3]
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saintandre-atompub-notify-01.txt