FeedTree and the “ping crisis” ▪
There’s growing concern in some quarters over blog pings, in particular that the various ping services are unlikely to be able to continue to provide their free service (viz., listing recently-updated blogs) for an exponentially increasing population of ping sources.
A corollary might be that, yes, ping services don’t scale, and what’s more, they’re not a good idea anyway. Last week, Paul Querna wrote:
For the Content Publishers, the value of pinging is that you make sure everyone you care about knows about your new content. But, if they really care, they will be crawling your RSS Feed anyways, because pings are not reliable. As a content Aggregator, you cannot just trust pings. If for whatever reason you miss a ping, regardless of it was your fault or the pingers fault, you just missed content, which is the Cardinal Sin of an Aggregator. People want their content, and any failure to reliably Aggregate content will drive people away from your service.
[…]
Smart people already solved this problem. Its called reliable IP multicasting. It is a whole different subject, that of replacing the current ping system, but it could be done. There are much much much much much better systems and designs for a single entity to distribute reliably a message to hundreds or thousands of other nodes, without causing excessive load on the system.
This, as it turns out, is a great advertisement for FeedTree, which uses decentralized multicast to go way beyond pings. Instead of just communicating a single bit (”I’ve updated!”), we distribute the new data as well (”I’ve updated, and here’s what I wrote!”), saving each subscriber another trip to the publisher to get the updated content.
[I’d been meaning to write about FeedTree’s applicability to the “ping crisis” last week, but forgot until someone pointed me to Wes Felter’s note along the very same lines.]