Some food for thought:
Irwin
Isn't this a similar mechanism that Firefox allows you do do??
Yes, but the difference is that Firefox doesn't come with a pre-populated
set of news feeds.
Irwin
What if more than a million Tiger Safaris were on the loose. Oh boy!
While
an addition 48 gigabytes of traffic a day or 1.4 terabyte a month is not
that much for large sites, but it will add up.
An we were all worried about the impact of Internet TV... 
How about randomizing the whole RSS polling process? Instead of pulling
down
RSS feeds every hour, let the feeds download randomly. Okay that will
help
distribute the loads on the servers more evenly, but that still doesn�t
resolve the issue of inefficient use of network resources, especially
for
those who pay for those kind of things. Suggestions?
How about synchronising all RSS feeds using NTP-synchronized clocks so
that every RSS client in the world polls for updates at exactly and
precisely the same instant, every 5 minutes. Sound crazy?
Let me introduce you to a little-known technology known as IP multicast.
Think about it...
--Michael Dillon
P.S. My company happens to carry large amounts of RSS-like data
using IP-multicast. You may have heard of this RSS-like system
invented back in the 1870's under the name of "ticker tape".
Nowadays NYSE, NASDAQ and other markets still distribute tick
data but it is done using multicast. Everything old is new again.
* Irwin Lazar:
Some food for thought:
Ahem, I would expect that people *pay* Apple for inclusion in the
default RSS list. Why should they be concerned by the extra
bandwidth?
A company that paid for 500K more eyeballs may get surprised if Tiger is
a huge hit and 5M eyeballs all show up at 3 minutes past the hour.
Fortunately, not everybody will install it the first 12 hours, so there
should be enough ramp-up time so the sites (which presumably have plenty
of spare kloo) will have time to make arrangements for the slashdotting..
Personally, I'd be surprised indeed if it makes more of a blip than Microsoft's
auto-update right after Patch Tuesday goes out each month, and I've heard naught
on here saying that *that* is an issue...