Instant Syndicating Standards

Content syndication helps users to publish and be kept aware of any changes to websites, human availability, or anything of interest that changes with time.

Applications today usually follow the pull model, i.e. they apply polling techniques to check for updates. Some issues regarding the pull model are limited scalability and bandwidth usage. To address these issues, some applications follow the push model, i.e. they receive updates automatically. Some examples of push technologies are XMPP, FeedTree, Cometd and SamePlace.

There are two content syndication standards: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom Syndication Format. The Atom Publishing Protocol also describes how applications may publish updates.

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