A Practical Approach to Peer-to-Peer Publish-Subscribe

The Web has filed to fulfill its promise of delivering relevant news and information in a timely fashion. In fact, it doesn�t deliver anything on its own at all; instead, it requires its users to explicitly poll information sources. Checking for updates by pointing, clicking, and reloading Web sites, whether the sites are Slashdot, news, or online classifieds, is not only slow, inefficient, and cumbersome for users, but it places an unnecessary bandwidth burden on content providers. Recent attempts to automate this process, with the aid of feed readers, have created more problems than they have solved. A system that detects updates to content anywhere on the Web and delivers it to users via an asynchronous channel, such as an instant message, would do much to relieve the burden on users and content providers alike.