It’s a fact, polling sucks, and it sucks, because it’s stupid. This is what kellan and rabble showed last year at OSCON :
On July 21, 2008, Friendfeed hit Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users, of which 6,721 visited Flickr in that 24-hour period, and could have potentially uploaded a photo.
And this is just friendfeed. How many services is there around here that are polling Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Youtube, or even this blog? Thousands (except maybe for this blog).
Push is the solution. Except that it only works if each service out there pushes, and if each consumer actually accepts to receive pushed content. That makes it pretty hypothetical, right?
We (pollers) should collaborate. Collaboration means that, even if we can all poll, there is probably no need for that. We could probably all grow tomatoes, but it makes more sense to buy them from someone who can grow them cheaper and more effectively than us.
This is what Superfeedr is all about: growing tomatoes doing something that you could do, but doing it cheaper, more efficiently and, more importantly, by sharing the results with you.
Yes, polling is still stupid, but we’re doing it for you and everybody who cares about the same feeds.
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