brainscat.com

Once upon a time, people got tired of having to check news sites many times a day to see if something new was available. To fix this, some smart people made aggregators who brought the news to you by getting an extra special page, that websites made available. This page could be lightweight and act as a notifier, only giving summaries, and telling you that new content was ready. Some were far more robust and brought the full content of the site to your screen. Sadly, having all these extra aggregators about created strain on the website; now they had to serve their old content and the new special version of the content. It got worse because the content was served multiple times, over and over again to users throughout the day, every time something new was added. Some people would download overlapping content as often as once every half an hour! This was even worse when nasty bad people used aggregators that were impolite piggies. These bad aggregators gobbled up content that they didn’t need because they didn’t respect the oh-so-important HTTP 304 response, a little message that said, “Nothing new to see here, move along.”

Things got worse when Adam, Dave, and a bunch of other creatures called web-casters and pod-casters wanted to serve large audio files of news and talk. Other people wanted to let their friends know when they had taken new pictures or drawn a new funny comic-strip. These files were big, and took even more time and work for the websites to serve.

Aside from all this, as long as the host could afford to serve all the content, aggregators were well and good if you only used one. A problem was that people wanted to use one at home, but the aggregator at work didn’t know what you had read at home. Smart people created programs like AmphetaDesk or Bloglines to solve this problem and all was well, at least, until so many people started using Bloglines that it slowed down to a crawl at times. You see, all the hosts were happy because they were serving less bandwidth, but more and more people used Bloglines, and Bloglines was serving the content of all the other websites combined!

All kinds of problems were showing up with everybody wanting to know what was new with news, pictures, or computer-radio. Adam became so popular, and his files were so large, that Adam wasn’t allowed to post his audio files as fast as he used to, and had to look for someone else to serve his audio. Bill had to cut back and only summarize the news on his website. Bloglines got slower and slower as more people used it.

Can peer-to-peer save the day?