Re: Idea for alternative RSS syncing system
Brent “NetNewsWire” Simmons raises the idea of “an open protocol (and open source server) for syncing RSS/Atom subscriptions”:http://inessential.com/2010/02/08/idea_for_alternative_rss_syncing_system, that is, a way of keeping multiple local newsreader apps (like on a Mac and an iPhone) in sync with each other, so that they share the same set of subscribed feeds, and remember which articles have already been read. You can think of it as “IMAP for RSS”.
NetNewsWire already does this using Google Reader, and Apple’s PubSub framework (which is what Safari and Mail use) shares the read/unread state using MobileMe. But it would be nice to have an open protocol.
I have some experience with this, having implemented the sync system used by PubSub. It’s an interesting problem—you might think I would have just used Apple’s SyncServices, and it’s true that it would have worked great for the subscription list, but it doesn’t scale well to huge numbers of rapidly-changing “read/unread” flags.
I have two suggestions (which I would have made on Brent’s blog, except he doesn’t allow comments anymore.)
