Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed's Going to Try

#1

RSS is the backbone for most things Web 2.0 but these days, it's not always fast enough. Politeness limits ping times to every 15 minutes at best in most cases, string a couple of applications together and information will sometimes not arrive where you're waiting for it for up to an hour.

A number of people are trying to speed up the feeds but today sees the first public mention of a new effort lead by the guys at popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed. FriendFeed is working on an open source add-on to RSS and Atom that will make it easier to discover when a feed has been updated. This could be a big deal.

What it Is
The FriendFeed crew is working on something called a Simple Update Protocol. It was first reported on by venture publication The Deal and subsequently by Venture Beat, leading us to believe the PR push is an effort to for the company to raise some more money.

In response to our questions, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit told us the following:

RWW: How will it work?
more.. link to news article