Page II: Redmond's U-turn on abbreviating Web logs may portend a looming bandwidth crunch.
Microsoft responded to a torrent of similar blogger criticism Wednesday by restoring the full blogs in its aggregated RSS feed and upping the character limit on the Web page to 1,250 from 500.
"We were looking for ways to enhance operational efficiency," said Kevin Ledley, group manager at MSDN. "What we have now is the best of both worlds: a Web page within a reasonable size, and within the reader we offer the full text so you can consume the full blog without having to leave your reader."
Microsoft's blog abbreviation debacle comes as blogging in general and RSS specifically make inroads into more spheres of business and personal life. Blogs are now an established means of corporate and developer communications. RSS has become a technological staple for news organizations including Reuters and CNET News.com, as well as a common tool for individual bloggers to distribute their dispatches about work and home.
MSDN's struggle with its aggregated feed raised questions among bloggers about the wisdom of pulling together numerous blogs into a single feed, with many at Microsoft weighing in against the practice.
Is RSS "broken"?
But it also raised questions about fundamental technologies behind blogging and Internet packet transmission generally, sparking a war of words among some bloggers about RSS's ability to scale with large numbers of blog postings.
"RSS is broken," wrote Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble in a Sept. 8 blog posting. "It's not scalable when tens of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes...Clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds."
RSS has taken heat for how it is maintained, and has sustained a challenge from a newer syndication protocol called Atom. Discussions on the future of the two competing protocols are ongoing.
Scoble's post elicited a strong defense by Dave Winer, a longtime champion of RSS who still exerts substantial authority over the protocol.
Winer contested Scoble's suggestion that the issue was "thousands of separate RSS feeds." Rather, Winer said, the problem is Microsoft's decision to offer an aggregate feed of all the MSDN blog postings.
"The other guys are screaming fire in a movie theater," Winer said following his blog posting on the subject. "The solution is for Microsoft to cancel the aggregated feed."
Microsoft also played down Scoble's attack on RSS.
"I don't think there's any limitation to RSS that we know of," MSDN's Ledley said. "We were trying to do a lot with one feed and we're trying to figure out the best way to go about that. I wouldn't argue with Robert and his viewpoint, because he looks at RSS from a different perspective than I do. But that's the great thing about blogs--people have their own opinions."
In an interview, Scoble acknowledged that calling RSS broken was "overstating it a bit," but he defended his criticisms of the protocol's ability to scale.
"I know of some big publishers who are very afraid of the scalability of RSS, and that fear is keeping them from implementing RSS or Atom feeds," Scoble said.
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