Imagine for a minute that RSS has replaced all traditional methods of internet information retrieval for you, save search.
How many RSS feeds would that total? For an average web surfer, I would suspect about 100. For a power user, 500 (this assumed every single bit of information on the internet were available via RSS). Think I’m crazy? Ask the average surfer to add up all the blogs, news sites, email, newsletters, “funny sites” and such they visit on a regular (monthly) basis, and you’d probably get around 100. You may currently feel you only “need” to subscribe to 12 blogs, but if you switched your entire web surfing habits to RSS you’d probably wind up with more than 100 feeds.
Now, try to imagine this working in a “River of News” style aggregator, where news just keeps getting added to a very long page. Completely unmanageable. Even the Outlook/Newsgator model is difficult, since the average person will go nuts on 300 daily news items.
Richard MacManus talks about the scalability problems MyYahoo, MyMSN and soon, iGoogle will have, not being able to handle more than a half-dozen feeds with any efficiency. Start.com/3/, not yet launched, might be able to handle it. Bloglines already can. When RSS hits the big time, most aggregators will find themselves woefully underprepared.
How will you switch? I’ve never seen an output option in any aggregator, although it may exist. I think we are going to see one of three things. (A) Most aggregators will be rebuilt to manage heavier loads. (B) We are going to see a lot of frustrated users copying feeds from MyYahoo to another reader by hand. or (C) RSS will hit a wall as the limitations of the clients destroy the content. I hope to god its not the last one, because I’m convinced RSS has the potential to eventually replace the web as we know it. 90% of my web time is spent in RSS. What about yours?
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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