Disposable Feeds, by Jeffrey Veen

Disposable Feeds

I'll admit to not using Yahoo for daily news all that much, but I was recently impressed by an unknown-to-me feature pointed out by a friend: RSS feeds for developing stories.

It had strangely not occurred to me before, but I've always given feeds a particular context and permanence -- as if they were simply a different way of representing a publication: You can read boingboing, or subscribe to the feed. And larger publications often offer a narrower context for their feeds: Read the New York Times, or one of their more focused feeds.

But why limit RSS to just publications or topic areas? Technorati and Feedster have long been offering keyword-based RSS for tracking queries. Yahoo (and others) took the next logical step by blending editorial selection and feed currency. This is hardly a big leap and probably not all that new, but illustrative of how we're starting to think of feeds as occasionally having a shelf life. Feeds are great at showing change, but what happens when the subject stops changing, becomes irrelevant or redundant, or simply goes away?

"Well, duh. Unsubscribe." I guess. But that just shifts the management burden back to you, the user. Think of all the little pieces of data you track, and how great it is to subscribe to future changes and updates. Last week, I would have subscribed to news on Lance Armstrong's retirement, three FedEx and one DHL deliveries, followups to nine comments I posted on other blogs, and two saved searches on Craig's List. That's a lot to manage in my feedreader, considering those items will no longer be relevant in a few days time. Stretched out across a year, and I'd be drowning in folders with hundreds of expired feeds.

Eric Lunt, one of the founders of Feedburner, has been thinking about this concept of microfeeds for quite a while. He wonders if the burden might shift to the publisher -- the equivalent of HTTP's codes for redirects, file not found, etc. Maybe there is a solution, coupled with new formats for temporal content, that brings disposability to aggregation. I would also wager that Eric and his colleagues are hard at work on showing publishers how splicing custom feeds for individual subscribers can help, too.

Ultimately, these issues are probably just growing pains -- another step towards a future where publishers provide structured content through smart, incremental delivery as their primary offering ... or even their only offering. Regardless, get ready to spend a lot more time in your feedreader.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 24 April 2005 at 3:56 PM. It was filed under Technology. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 25 April 2005 at 4:51 AM Mark Wubben wrote:

HTTP status codes should be fine. The only problem is how to make the aggregator unsubscribe from a feed while also letting the user know why it's unsubscribing.

Perhaps it'd work if the expired feed sends out one item explaining why it has expired, and a status code (410, for instance).

2. On 25 April 2005 at 6:44 AM Struan Donald wrote:

The problem with issuing status codes and an explanation is that it still doesn't solve the problem of your aggregator's subscription list filling up with defunct and now irrelevant feeds.

Of course the user could then delete them or the newsreader could archive them in some way but both of these seem like slightly inelegant solutions to the problem.

3. On 25 April 2005 at 7:37 AM J. King wrote:

Funny, I assumed newsreaders already did this. It seems painfully obvious to me that 410 Gone would signal a newsreader to unsubscribe. A prompt with the response body printed would likely be helpful, I guess.

It always surprises me how people tend to forget that HTTP already has a lot of useful features that can be made use of.

4. On 25 April 2005 at 1:27 PM John Blossom wrote:

We called this concept "story weblogs" in an article last fall. Threads that have a life of their own as stories evolve are a fact, and evolving towards a new kind of journalism. Think what Woodward and Bernstein could have done with this concep. Link:

http://www.shore.com/commentary/newsanal/items/2004/20041011instant.html

All the best,
John Blossom
President
Shore Communications Inc.

5. On 25 April 2005 at 9:31 PM Nick Bradbury wrote:

Many RSS readers already support this via HTTP 410. In FeedDemon's case, the user is notified when a feed is "gone," and these feeds are shown in gray and never updated again if the user chooses not to unsubscribe.

6. On 26 April 2005 at 8:15 AM James Stewart wrote:

I've been increasingly using RSS to follow comments on blog posts. In a few cases (software announcements and the like) those comment threads may go on for some time and I'd like to keep following them ad nauseum, but generally they're only of interest for a couple of days.

Right now, I think my preference would be for an 'archived feeds' folder within my reader. A feed might be moved there following a 410 or using a global and/or per-feed preference ('move feed if not updated after X days'). I'd like my software to offer a few ways of notifying me: with a popup informing me of changes every 24 hours, with a report I could go and look for, with an email notification, or with an 'internal feed' of changes. If I could choose one of those as a preference, that would seem ideal.

7. On 26 April 2005 at 8:40 AM Andrew wrote:

Or why not allow me to set a threshold of interest in a feed that would trigger it's automatic unsubscription? Think Slashdot: I set my threshold at "4" so I only see a certain level of activity in a thread.

What if I could subscribe to an RSS feed and set a minimum-update-frequency requirement? I know, for example, that a FedEx feed that's not updated at least 1 time per day is probably expired. "Developing news" might only be "developing" if the feed's updated 3 times a week. Comment threads in blogs might last two weeks; once there are fewer than 2 changes to the feed per day after 14 days from my subscription date, the feed should dissapear.

8. On 26 April 2005 at 9:40 AM Michael wrote:

I believe bloglines already supports the automatic deletion of feeds that return 4XX error codes. Not right away; but if they get a 4XX for (I think) 3 days in a row, they auto-delete the feed and any subscriptions associated with it. They do similar things with permanent redirects.

9. On 28 April 2005 at 8:01 AM Dan wrote:

Or, how about building on the useful neuro-biological function we have for this kind of thing ... aka 'forgetting'. Linked to Andrew's idea above of thresholds of activity settings, perhaps we should get software to model how we have generally handled information that recedes into the distance as it gets less relevant, less active i.e. to forget-about-it. That would be a far more elegant way of this automatically (of course, whilst enabling it to be dredged out of a long-term memory if needed.

So, the newsreader's presentation of currently relevant ideas gravitates towards a short-term scratchpad, based around concepts currently in focus, modeling the latter in terms of your activity and their activity (on the former, possibly including aggregating keyword/concept-based activity across multiple spaces *outside* of the newsreader, ideally i.e. noting your emails, browsing, IM and posting about such matters elsewhere too)

10. On 10 May 2005 at 9:38 AM Randy Charles Morin wrote:

The answer is HTTP 410 Gone
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rssfeedstate.html#gone

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