HTTP is Not the Answer (Score 1)

Massive polling for updates leads to scalability problems? Big surprise! We need to learn that HTTP is not always the best technology for the job. Just-in-time content delivery requires a different set of tools. There's already an Internet-Draft for sending Atom feeds over XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber), and the same "publish-subscribe" technology could be used for RSS (or a smart service could translate to Atom so your client doesn't need to parse all those RSS formats). Check out PubSub.com for a real-life implementation of the basic concept (they track 3+ million feeds and notify you when a feed you're interested in has changed, and even do handy keyword-based monitoring). And one added benefit of using the XMPP pubsub extension is that these are all open protocols with many open-source implementations. In this problem-space at least, HTTP is so second-millennium!