Several months back, we announced SUP (Simple Update Protocol), a proposal for making RSS and Atom feed updates faster and more efficient. Since then, a number of services have added SUP support, we've SUP-enabled our feed fetcher, and there are now thousands of SUP enabled feeds being imported into FriendFeed. Among the services that now support SUP are Disqus, Brightkite, Identi.ca (and other Laconica-powered micro-blogs), BackType, and 12seconds.tv. Whenever one of these feeds is updated, the new entry appears on FriendFeed within seconds (non-SUP feeds typically take 15-30 minutes to update). Check out the public feed of Brightkite updates to see this in action.
We've also added several additional tools and resources to simplify SUP development:
- Frequently Asked Questions about SUP
- A SUP validator (source)
- An RSS/Atom Feed tester, which checks your SUP links and also shows how your feeds will be rendered on FriendFeed.
- A Public SUP feed, that anyone can link to and contribute updates. This is ideal for small publishers and individual blogs.
- Open source implementations of SUP are available as part of Laconica and Benjamin Golub's open-source blog software, as well as the example code provided by FriendFeed.
You can read more details about SUP and check out sample code on Google Code and discuss the proposal in the SUP FriendFeed room.
5 comments:
What is the benefit to a publisher such as Benjamin to generate SUP ids for a publicly-addressable resource?
Does FriendFeed support XML-RPC pings or sitemap pings?
Nice update and good to see the X-SUP-ID HTTP header information updated in the FAQ.
Niall, SUP is a lightweight single resource to check for updates to all interesting resources for some window of time.
Rather than polling lots of RSS files or similar, you poll the one SUP, and that tells you what other things to go fetch. The original proposal (linked in the post above) has a more thorough explanation.
For the publisher, the benefits are reduced polling abuse and faster time-to-live on other sites.
What About Twitter?
Still too bad SUP was chosen over evangelizing XMPP.
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