RecentChanges + InstantMessaging. Discuss.
That RecentChangesJunkies have to poll RecentChanges constantly to get their fix is inefficient since it eats bandwidth and wastes people's time. RichSiteSummary is even worse since it is even more expensive in terms of bandwidth and computing costs, and robots load the changes every half hour. Since we are an OnlineCommunity, high traffic is not a goal but a hindrance, so it would be best to limit bandwidth costs.
It would be nicer to push the changes out to people, and the way to do that on the Internet is through InstantMessaging. Overall bandwidth consumption is reduced as rather than have a many-to-many communication, one has a many-to-one-to-many communication, which is more efficient. Further, aggregating data in one place facilitates secondary services, such as digesting, summarization, InformationVisualization, recommendations, SocialNavigation, and most importantly CommunityMarketing. So while not everyone would be immediately attracted to the service for the altruistic reason of saving bandwidth, the secondary services would AddValue enough to draw people there.
The problem of course is that the two major IM networks, MSN and AOL, are closed. However, Jabber is open, and the protocol is simple enough that you can write a working Jabber client in a reasonably small amount of code. Another advantage of using Jabber is that it theoretically has pipes into MSN and AOL, even if those pipes are very fragile. Also, Jabber has an XML-based protocol, which makes it an ideal MachineInterface as a NetworkService. Also the Jabber server and several clients are OpenSource.
Running an IM service is expensive for most wiki administrators. But given a suitable MachineInterface, a third party service, like NetNewsWire or Technorati already do for RSS (and Meatball / MetaWiki could do for wikis) could aggregate the streams they poll every half hour and then push out the changes by IM. For most people that would be sufficient.
Further, if there were a MachineInterface running as a NetworkService, then better UserInterfaces could be created. Now while this idea might devolve into PointCast, the difference is that there really isn't any urgency to be aware of changes every 15 minutes unless you have some neurotic fixation with the wiki. Rather, one could have a clean interface that aggregates RecentChanges from a number of wikis / sites in an easy to read fashion.
The ChangeAggregators that already exist might be upgraded to support this from their current RSS/pull-oriented model.
Examples
WikiPedia already does this to some extent on InternetRelayChat. e.g. irc://irc.freenode.net/enrc.wikipedia
Yes, we all know that I love the JabberProject, but I thought you needed to be reminded once again. -- SunirShah