More talk about secure RSS:

“I wish someone would solve the Secure RSS feature so we could apply some kinid of ACL to our subcriptions.  I’d love to be able to subscribe to each member of our company and get their RSS feeds from anywhere I want – NOT just inside the firewall.” —Pete’s Blog (Peter Fahlman) [via Into the MyST]

Already done…with Enterprise weblogging systems like MyST’s mySmartChannels, and authentication aware aggregators like NewsGator, this is possible today.

Lots of talk recently about RSS, calendars, PIM’s, and the like. Ray Ozzie wonders:

Has anyone built an RSS aggregator that can aggregate multiple calendar RSS feeds into your Outlook or Notes personal calendar?

I can’t go into details yet (sorry)…but I can say this is just the tip of the iceberg of what will be possible with the next version of NewsGator.

The last umpteen comments I’ve heard regarding “feed:” is that we should be using MIME types instead. But NO ONE has addressed ANY of the problems with MIME types…rather, the comments are all basically saying “MIME types are the right way to do this.” Let me describe the MIME problems in more detail here, and if someone has solutions or suggestions, please post them. Two of these problems are deal-breakers.

Problem 1: [severity: deal-breaker] In order to serve up a file with a specific MIME type, you need to make some changes in your web server configuration. There are a LOT of people out there (shared hosting, anyone?) who don’t have this capability. We have to cater to the masses, people – we’re trying to drive adoption of this technology.

Problem 1a: [severity: annoyance] There are even more people who wouldn’t know a MIME type from a hole in the head. If Joe user figures out that he can build a XML file with notepad that contains his RSS data (and it’s being done more often than you think), and upload it to his web site, you’d think that’d be enough. Sorry, Joe, you need to change the MIME type too. The what?

Problem 2: [severity: deal-breaker] If you register a handler for a MIME type, the handler gets the contents of the file, rather than the URL. This is great if you’re a media player or whatever. However, with RSS, the client tool needs the URL of the RSS file, not the actual contents of the RSS file. Well, it needs the contents too, but it needs the URL so it can poll the file for changes later. This means that the file that’s actually registered with a new MIME type would have to be some kind of intermediate file, a “discovery” file if you will. So now, not only would Joe user have to learn about MIME types, but he’d have to create another discovery file as well.

Remember the goal. We need an easy subscription mechanism for users to subscribe to feeds. We need a solution that will a) be workable with today’s tools, and b) be easy to implement for the vast majority of publishers. Using feed: as discussed recently meets these requirements.

So please, post your comments. However, if you’re going to advocate using MIME types for RSS, make sure you address AT LEAST problems 1 and 2 in your comment. Don’t just say “feed: is wrong, you have to use MIME types” – address the real problems. Otherwise, it’s all theoretical.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about RSS replacing email…and the spam problem is what most people have been pointing to to justify their position. Hmm.

I think having RSS feeds in the NewsGator forums actually gets us pretty far down this path. The Lockergnome forums do this too, and I’m sure there are others. Suppose someone posts a question about NewsGator in one of our forums. I (and many other folks) get this notication via RSS. I respond to the question in the forum, which causes the original author to get a RSS notification of the change. And so on, until the thread is complete.

Really, I think this is as close to a one-to-one conversation as we’ve gotten with RSS. The forums provide the infrastructure for these conversations, so people can easily post; and they also provide an archive of everything that’s been said. The big difference between this and email is that here, the world is watching the conversation.

To get a bit closer, we could probably have “private” threads where the participants are the only ones who can see them, and the forum RSS feed would be customized for each subscriber, depending on which threads they had acess to. This really isn’t necessary in our particular case, but it’s something to think about.

All that said, I really don’t see RSS “replacing” email, as some have predicted…they both are great communication mechanisms, and I believe they solve different problems. Email is great for one-to-one or small groups of people who know each other, and RSS is excellent as a broadcast mechanism.

After some lively discussion yesterday (more references below), here are my thoughts.

• We need to come up with something that’s easy for the publisher. If it’s not, this has approximately 0.142% chance of widespread adoptance.
   
• MIME types alone do not solve the problem – lots of discussion about this on yesterday’s post.
   
• Escaping the URL after feed: is going to be way too error prone. Look how many feeds don’t correctly escape their content – this is going to be much worse. Which means tools will have to deal with correct and incorrect forms both…so let’s just do it the easy way.
   
• Having a “standard” port for aggregators to listen on is a bad idea; and in fact, many folks (including me) would argue that having the aggregator listen on any port is a bad idea.
   
• We’re not developing a new protocol – this is merely a hook into the browser and the shell to make it easy to subscribe. The characters “feed:” will never go across the wire in a request. 

With all that said, I’m thinking we just go with

feed:http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx

More reference on this: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Keep the comments coming! Let’s try to hammer this out soon – we’re all in this to increase adoption of RSS…and arguing over MIME types, parameters, and escaping doesn’t get us too much closer to that end.

Office 2003 is now available for download for MSDN Universal subscribers, and certain volume license customers.

Outlook 2003 totally rocks with NewsGator – try it, you’ll like it! Be sure to check out the new search folders with NewsGator.

Pete Hopkins (here, here) and Steven Wood (here) are lobbying for support for subscription links in the format

feed://http://example.org/rss.xml

Steven even posted the necessary registry entries for Internet Explorer to wire up an application to respond to a user clicking a link like this. So, for example, NewsGator could add a subscription whenever a user clicks on a feed:// link.

This seems like a reasonable idea to me…with the obvious benefit that a user could just click on the link, and the aggregator could add a subscription to the feed. As opposed to the situation today, where if the user clicks on a feed link, they’ll see (at best) a page full of XML. Now of course they can right-click on an existing link, and select “Subscribe in NewsGator”, but supporting a left-click subscription as well might be nice.

Other aggregators support a subscription link in a format like http://localhost:5678/…, but I dislike the idea of applications listening on certain ports like this. The feed:// idea is much more attractive, IMHO.

Comments?