FeedTree

High-level summaries: for users, for publishers

Introduction

In 2004, as site syndication grew out of relative obscurity into a pervasive Internet movement, feed publishers became concerned over the way in which RSS/Atom data is transferred over the network. Because RSS clients check for news by repeatedly requesting a news feed from its canonical URL—typically every hour, sometimes even more frequently—the bandwidth requirements of hosting an RSS feed may potentially be disproportionately large (as compared with other Web resources of similar size). At the same time, end users who wish to see more timely news (that is, users wanting shorter delays between updates) have every incentive to exacerbate the network stress on publishers by polling feeds even more frequently.

We have previously identified this pair of opposed demands (viz., bandwidth reduction for publishers; timeliness for users) in the FeedTreePaper. In that work we further outlined our design for FeedTree, a system which replaces the polling component of news feeds with peer-to-peer multicast. The design, based on the Scribe group communication system, offers timely and efficient delivery of micronews by sharing the burden of delivery among cooperating peers in the network. Messages in the FeedTree system may optionally be cryptographically signed by the publisher to defend against spoofed content from malicious nodes.

Since then, we have developed this design into a working software system. Current users of news feeds can download the FeedTreeProxy to instantly “upgrade” their existing feed readers to be a part of the FeedTree network. Existing RSS feeds will be integrated on-the-fly into the multicast system without any extra effort by publishers.

Publishers can, optionally, install the FeedTreePublisher to provide instantaneous, cryptographically signed updates to FeedTree users.

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Poster

New: The FeedTreePoster is now available (in PDF and JPEG formats).

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Further reading

• FeedTreePaper

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