Check out this service called Superfeedr that does massive feed fetching. The basics are:
1) Subscribe to a list of feeds 2) Get notified of updates over Atom PubSub The obvious benefit is that it eliminates the need to build your own polling service. I'm not sure it's appropriate for us to use this in place of our current polling architecture as that might be relying too much on an external service. Additionally, it costs money though they claim that you can tell them "how much it costs you to parse your feeds, and *we will match this*for you." If we can successfully quantify the costs associated with running minibrain we could get a proposal and see if it might save money to use Superfeedr. On the other hand, there's Gnip, which has been mentioned before. This is all maybe a waste of breath. Mostly, I want widespread Atom PubSub and I want it now. -Randall
