general announcement text

Subject: Announcement: FeedTree (RSS over p2p)

We are pleased to announce the first public release of
FeedTree, a peer-to-peer distribution system for RSS and Atom
news feeds.

[ For the impatient: more info and downloads at
  http://feedtree.net/ ]

FeedTree reduces the bandwidth burden of providing news feeds,
while at the same time allowing feed updates to reach end
users faster than before (within seconds, not hours).  Users
of FeedTree form a peer-to-peer network which is used to
multicast new feed events; this multicast (built on Scribe) is
an efficient group notification mechanism which divides the
burden of distributing feed data among the feed's subscribers.

The software release includes:

  * The FeedTree Proxy, an end-user Java application which
    allows existing RSS reading software to receive updates
    via the FeedTree network. The proxy also works with
    existing RSS and Atom feeds, polling them as necessary and
    sharing new content with other FeedTree users.

  * The FeedTree Publisher, an optional tool allowing feed
    authors to "push" updates to FeedTree users immediately
    and cryptographically sign those updates for authenticity.

More information, including academic research, documentation,
bug reporting, etc. can be found on the FeedTree website:
http://feedtree.net/ .

FeedTree is an ongoing project of researchers in the Rice
University Computer Science Department.

--
Dan Sandler
dsandler@cs.rice.edu
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dsandler/