Right, so how does the smart hub aggregate the feeds? Does it then have to crawl to find the list? That wouldn't be very useful. Having said that...
+1 For 'smart, aggregating hub generating a synthetic feed' +1 For XRD discovery of the firehose endpoint. Thinking a bit more about the firehose, what about making it more flexible. Specifically, if we treat 'firehose' as any bundle of feeds (all, or some), then a hub could define multiple firehose streams. For example, at PostRank we classify feeds by topic, so if someone wanted to subscribe to "Technology", we could expose that as a firehose so the user doesn't have to subscribe to every feed in that topic. In essence, a firehose stream is then any bundle of feeds. This may be overloading the hub spec but the overall mechanics would be: - A (super)user can declare a firehose endpoint - A (super)user is then able to add or remove subscriptions from the firehose to create arbitrary aggregation streams - A subscriber uses XRD to discover the available aggregation streams - Firehose with 'all' feeds is a special case of the above, where all feeds are present This definitely adds more complexity into the hub... The alternative is of course for the publisher to create a syndicated feed and publish that directly as a standalone feed. Still trying to weight the up/ downsides in my head, but want to put it out there as an idea. -------- Ilya Grigorik postrank.com
