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2002 != 2009

Tuesday, September 08, 2009 by Dave Winer.

There's been concern expressed today in various Twitter messages that rssCloud might not scale to support all the people who might want to use it. 

I'm not an expert in massive centralized systems, that's why I designed this to be decentralized, like RSS is.  

I set up an rssCloud server, fairly confident that it would scale to meet the demand, and with a fallback if it shouldn't. I'm not risking anything, because we know that polling works for RSS. rssCloud is an optimization, its purpose is to make RSS faster. But if it fails RSS still works. As I wrote earlier, even though many people predicted in 1999 that RSS would never work, it's actually never failed, there is no RSS fail whale.  

This is not my first time with rssCloud. My team at UserLand Software implemented it in 2002 in Radio and Manila. We had problems, but I've factored in what we learned in 2002 in the 2009 implementation. If you're interested in the details, I've spelled them out in the Implementor's Guide to rssCloud, which was published in mid-July and has been reviewed by dozens of programmers, and implemented by more than a few, including the people at Automattic. 

I'm sure we'll talk about this at tomorrow's rssCloud meetup in Berkeley.