FriendFeed proposes new feed update protocol

A busy day on the FriendFeed front, with the growingly popular life streaming service adding a range of customizable widgets and proposing a new protocol for updating websites. See JR’s post for details on the widget side.

The new update protocol proposed by FriendFeed aims to augment existing feeds in Atom and RSS by making updates from third party web sites faster and more efficient. The Simple Update Protocol is a compact “ping feed” that web services can produce in order to alert sites that read feeds when a feed has been updated. The crux of the idea is that it is inefficient for a service like FriendFeed to be constantly polling third party sites for updates to feeds, both from FriendFeed’s perspective but more importantly, from the site hosting the feed. The protocol aims to shortcut the need to poll a site through a blog like ping service but focused on the feed itself and in a more centralized, cross platform compatible manner.

There’s nothing concrete yet, but FriendFeed is calling for comment, and has released some same code on Google Code. More details on the FriendFeed blog here.