In The Syndication Sky is Falling! Mark Nottingham disputes the idea that the polling-for-updates architecture at the heart of RSS and Atom and other syndication / pub-sub / webfeed formats (the living web’s answer to “push”) inherently won’t scale:
Wow, I guess I should remind the folks at Google, Yahoo, CNN and my old colleagues at Akamai that what they’re doing is fundamentally flawed; the Web doesn’t scale, sorry.
I guess I’ll also have to tell the people at the Web caching workshops that what they do is futile, and those folks doing Web metrics are wasting their time. What a shame.
… I do mean to pick on the general notion that the Web can’t scale enough for syndication’s purposes; the Web provably does scale, and like gangbusters.