Why real-time RSS is a big deal for big payloads, too

I'm very much interested in emerging Web publishing ping systems like Google's PubSubHubBub and Dave Winer's rssCloud. I call these systems "real-time RSS" for short, since they basically allow syndicated content ("RSS") to be delivered at Twitter speeds ("real-time").

I've noticed a focus on using these systems to replicate Twitter, but think the opportunity for publishing bigger-than-Twitter content is just as exciting.

Why I'm kind of obsessed with this:

1. As an RSS consumer, fat-content real-time RSS could improve my ability to read blogs. I read hundreds of feeds for my day job, via Google Reader, the best RSS aggregator available. Some of the most essential feeds are updated within Reader only sporadically, hours after the originating feeds have updated, literally making me worse at my job (timely blogging). Real-time RSS systems promise to solve this problem (Google Reader is already starting to implement these systems.)
2. As an RSS publisher they could improve my ability to reach readers. I don't have a technical role at the blogging company I work for, but I've advocated real-time RSS as a way to reach our readers faster, and to stay competitive with other publishers. Frankly, I'd love to see our feeds updating fast in Google Reader, because they come pretty slow at the moment, in giant clumps covering hours, and I don't want other sites gaining a big lead.
   
3. As a technology observer, I'm curious to see whether the split between Twitter-like, 140-character-or-less implementations of real-time RSS and "fatter" uses of the systems can be resolved in an elegant and constructive way. "Let's just duplicate Twitter" seems way too constrictive a way to view these systems from where I sit; on the other hand, the less ambitious approaches are the ones that tend to be simpler, and thus "win."
   

Google Reader Redesign Misses Something

Google is asking for feedback on the redesign of its "Reader" RSS aggregator.

Here's some: It's still too hard to assign feeds to folders -- the names of the folders get truncated in the Feed Settings menu. See image at left.

The menu should expand to accommodate the names, with a much larger maximum width.

This is still my single biggest design issue with Reader.

I'm also curious to see if they fix the technical issues, like misreporting old feed items as new, and very slow updates for some feeds (i.e. Google's servers don't fetch the feed often enough).

UPDATE: Same thing with the folder list in the left sidebar, see below. And there's no way to make this wider:

Google Reader's OPML support sucks, here's how to fix it

At my new gig I deal a lot with OPML files, and Google Reader blows at this, here's how to fix (Chris Wetherell, it's not enough that you lent me sound equipment for my wedding, now I expect you to do custom software work for me too ;->):

• Allow me to view an OPML file on the Web live, as a folder, in Reader. I have an OPML list I have to reimport every couple weeks and it's annoying, I have to delete the old feeds associated with the prior version of the OPML file and then save the file to my hard drive then import the new feed then tag the imported feeds. The person sending me the file should just be able to update it on his Web server and the changes propagate instantly to Reader.



• Tag or otherwise group imported OMPL instead of just dumping into my account with no way to see what's newly imported. This is so basic.



• Allow me to export just a folder as OPML, not everything under the sun. And sharing on the Google Reader network is no substitute for this feature, my buddies/coworkers are not all on Reader.



• Likewise, allow me to import just one (or N) sections of a particular OPML file.



• Allow me to export a particular folder as OPML url, not just as a file.

OPML is one of those things that seems like an esoteric feature until you really, really need it and then you need it bad, working properly and smoothly, full featured.

Google Reader is a slow, limpy, sedated way to read news

So I subscribe to the feed containing this item, and 46 minutes after it was posted it has still not shown up in my Google Reader account. I only found out about it through a Google News alert RSS feed.

Last week I noticed big delays with other sites in Google Reader.

Perhaps I'm extra sensitive to this because the reader I used to use, which I wrote myself in Perl and which ran on my own server, checked every single feed every single time you brought it up, using conditional HTTP GET requests. I was *never* getting anything other than the latest news from all my feeds (though I did consider inserting code to limit checks to, say, no more than one every 10 minutes).

If Google doesn't have the server resources to fetch feeds on demand so they are never more than 15 minutes out of date, it should create a browser plugin allowing us users to fetch the feeds ourselves on the client side.

Google Reader delivers news like a snail

Right now Google's RSS reader is lagging

• Fake Steve Jobs - 4 posts
  



• Daring Fireball - 2 posts



• Eater SF - 2 posts

And those are just the ones I'm aware of (and with 146 feeds, I can only check a tiny percentage, so the problem is probably worse than this).

Google has a great news reader, as long as you don't expect your news to be, well, new.