Patchcasting
Colleague Billy Sylvester has an interesting idea for RSS feeds and pings – patchcasting. It’s not quite as media-hip as podcasting, but could be a nice new part of the blogosphere on its own. The idea is to host a “feed portal” where software publishers of all kinds could host feeds chronicling releases of their software. When a new update ships, an new entry is added, and the appropriate ping is generated and sent out to the ping server.
The updated entry information would be nominally human-readable – version and descriptive information about the release would be useful to interested reader – but for the most part these feeds would best read and consumed by other machines. Users would be able to choose which software packages they want to monitor via patchcasting, and the operating system (eventually?) or a helper software agent would check for updates to the subscribed feeds, and react accordingly, depending on the policy set by the user. For critical OS updates from Microsoft with a valid trust assertion, say, new entries would be downloaded and installed automatically. For other packages, the pending patches, updates and upgrades would simply be presented for user action when the user checked in.
One of the nice features of subscribing to feeds is that they are anonymous, or more precisely, unidirectional. I’m loathe to sign up for email notification from software vendors regarding product updates and other information. At best, I get way more “update” information than I really need. At worst, my inbox begins to mysteriously fill up with unsolicited mail from all number of solictitative parties. With an RSS feed that provides product update information, I’m in control. I check in to see what’s new when I want, and only when I want. When I check in to see what’s new on the update feed for XYZ Software, they have no idea who I am – I’m unspammable, unmarketable in this setup.
VersionTracker has something a little like this. If you look here you can see they are spinning the updates for a wide variety of packages into an RSS feed, in this case, grouped by platform. What Billy Sylvester envisions is something much more granualar, I think. One feed for a specific software package. For example, if you own Adobe Photoshop CS for Windows, you would want to monitor a feed Adobe maintains just for this product. You may also want to subscribe to the “Plugins” feed which streams information on available plugins and updates for them. In any case, the right granularity would be that which made managing policy for updates to the feeds easy and effective. For Adobe Photoshop CS, any new updates that appear in its feed might be downloaded automatically, available for quick installation the next time the user checks in.
Currently, there’s obviously no OS support for such a thing as patchcasting. It would take some time and proof that the idea is sound before software agents could be written to implement the policy aspects for the patchcasting user – auto-downloads, pop-up notifiers, etc. For now, though, patchcasting seems to be useful enough just as a function of your favorite newsreader. Instead of giving your favorite software vendors a convenient way to contact you whenever they’d like, subscribe to feeds for the specific packages your interested in. A new update will offer a link that will bring you to the appropriate download page, no email needed, thank you very much. If this succeeds at all, tools for patchcasting will surely follow.
Comments
That users can choose what software packages they want to supervise through patchcasting it is plus. Also it is very convenient that a subscription on feed are anonymous, idea brilliant, it is necessary to support.
Posted by: Bruce | January 13, 2006 06:28 AM