rssCloud

» see rsscloud.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

RSS has a polling problem. A reader checks your feed every fifteen minutes or every hour, which means it is almost always asking a server that has nothing new to say, and when you do publish, everyone finds out late. The fix was written into the format early. An element called cloud, implemented in 2001 in Manila and Radio UserLand, let a feed name a server that subscribers could register with, so the server could tell them the moment something changed. Then nobody used it for eight years.

In July 2009 Dave Winer picked it back up and put a page at a freshly registered rsscloud.org titled Rebooting the RSS Cloud. The tone is his: realtime was the Next Big Thing that summer and the mechanism for it had been sitting in the spec the whole time. "Great domain name, don't you think!" is on the front page under "And they say all the good ones are taken."

The reboot got one enormous break. On 7 September 2009, WordPress.com turned rssCloud on across every blog it hosted, 7.5 million of them, which TechCrunch covered the same day. Two months earlier the protocol had zero deployments. Overnight it had more feeds than any competing push system, and for a few weeks that looked decisive.

~ the record ~

~ the push war ~

It was decisive for about forty-eight hours. On 9 September 2009 TechCrunch ran the counter-argument under the headline that the fat pings win, laying out why PubSubHubbub was ahead: Feedburner, Blogger, Google Reader, YouTube, FriendFeed and LiveJournal had already adopted it, and its notifications carried the new content rather than just a signal to come and fetch it. rssCloud had a bigger install base and a thinner message. Google had the readers.

I like this fight more than its size justifies. Two mechanisms, both reasonable, both documented in public by people arguing in blog posts, and the whole thing decided inside a single quarter by which one Google's products already spoke. I was writing software by then and reading feeds every day without ever once checking how an update had reached me. Neither mechanism was visible from the reading end at all, which is why the argument stayed among a few dozen people who built the plumbing.

~ what the squatters kept ~

The project's own record of its death is precise. The rssCloud blog's final post is dated 30 December 2009, about a specification Winer had finished over the holidays called CloudPipe, and it ends by saying the project is nearing completion of its initial phase. The main site carries a stamp reading "Last update: Saturday, January 02, 2010, 4:42:01 PM," and that stamp never changed again. It was still there at the end of December 2010, unchanged for a year. On 3 March 2010, WordPress.com announced it had turned on PubSubHubbub for what were by then 10.5 million blogs, mentioning rssCloud once, in passing, as a comparable thing.

After that the domain decays in stages that are legible in the archive. By September 2012 rsscloud.org serves a bare directory listing of its own HTML files, the rendering layer gone. By 2013 it is an unrelated news aggregator calling itself "RSS Cloud, the top RSS aggregator online." By 2019 it is a cloud hosting review site. Today it is a WordPress content farm titled "RSSCloud.org, Real Simple Tech Solutions," and the origin behind it has stopped answering altogether. Three different owners have now taken the name of a dead push protocol because it sounds like it is about storage.

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