On 3/14/2010 6:24 PM, Brett Slatkin wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Jay Rossiter <[email protected]> wrote:
>> (IMO, requiring auth to subscribe to public feeds is harmful to the
>> community and contrary to the reasoning behind designing PuSH, but that's
>> another show.</AB>)
> Not sure about this assertion. We're trying to separate ideology from
> the PubSubHubbub spec, even though often the lines are blurred. The
> goal is a useful conduit for pubsub data. I see valid use-cases (like
> analytics) for requiring authentication for public feeds.
I can see some use cases for authentication, but none for public feeds.
These are essentially private hubs (even though they may fetch any URL), and I
feel pretty strongly that including these for auto-discovery and
auto-subscription is falsely advertising a generally available service.
The analytics use case only makes sense if each subscription is for a
single end-user. When the feed is consumed en-masse such as via Google
Reader/Bloglines/Pageflakes/etc., virtually any analytics benefit received by
knowing who the feed was pushed to is gone, because all users of that service
get the same content. It can't be individualized.
I highly doubt that the Google Reader team (e.g.) will be going out to
every new hub that requires authorization just so that they can turn on PuSH
subscriptions for a handful of feeds, and I even further doubt that they're
going to have every end-user/consumer of a specific feed input their own
credentials and setting up dozens or hundreds of individualized subscriptions
to the same content.
I'll know that I'll be adding a blacklist to my subscription client for
hubs that require authentication on public feeds. It's simply not in my
workflow to go to every new hub trying to get an account for a service that is
designed to benefit the publisher. If they go out of their way to make using
PuSH with their feeds difficult, I can only oblige them by not using it. They
and their readers lose out on the benefits they wanted to achieve.
--
Jay Rossiter | Software Engineer/System Administrator
Pioneering RSS Advertising Solutions
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> | Phone: 503.896.6187 |
Fax: 503.235.2216
Website: www.pheedo.com <http://www.pheedo.com/> | RSS:
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