Podcast Apps and Aggregators: here's why you should be using Podping NOW!

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Podping is the transformative new system by which your podcast app or aggregator will learn about new episodes.

The days of computers ticking away the dark millennia in server farms, sucking in energy just to check if any one of a million RSS feeds has updated in the last hour, are coming to an end.

Thanks to Podping on the Hive blockchain, your app or service can watch hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions, of RSS feeds with less computer power than a single Raspberry Pi. This isn't a joke.

Yesterday I posted a short sales pitch for @podping for Podcast Hosting and Publishing companies. Podping already has a critical mass of hosting companies using it. Over the last 28 days in live beta use a total of 115,860 Podpings have been sent, that's 2.84 podpings/min. Each of those is a podcast host signaling one of their RSS feeds has updated.

The graph below shows the activity and the four hosting companies who are already signaling changes in any of their feeds. You can watch the Podping stream from the Hive blockchain now and turn off all speculative polling of feeds on these hosts.

Podping is in live beta with these hosts:

Already Dave Jones at @podcastindex has turned off his polling aggregators for these four podcast hosts. That's a fair bit of server power replaced with less than a $5 per month server.

The sample code for watching this continuous stream of updates is on Github for Python and Javascript and free to use, adapt and bake into your own solutions. This is a work in progress but it's come a long way, very quickly, thanks to the easy to use nature of the Hive Blockchain. There's a sample service via Websockets as well right now. This is just the start.

Podping makes use of the decentralized and stable Hive Blockchain which has been running for more than 4 years (with a name change last year). The economics of Hive make this use entirely practical and means PodcastIndex can offer this service to all on a Value for Value basis. If this makes your business more profitable in some way, consider supporting this open source effort with whatever value you get from it.

For a more detailed explanation of Podping and Hive start here. All the code is open source on Github.

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