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I'm looking for an RSS reader that can update feeds as quickly as every 10 seconds.

It would be particularly useful if it could alert on new items with sound and visual alerts. And even better if it could automatically open any new links in a browser or have some scripting interface to the content of new articles.

I've downloaded a lot of readers and have not found this yet. The lowest search interval I've found is 1 minute. Obviously, I would be careful not to abuse the 10 second interval and would never use it with something like a normal blog.

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If you need this, you're using the wrong technology. – Daniel Beck Jan 29 '11 at 15:45
What OS do you plan to do this on? – Wuffers Apr 24 '11 at 11:06
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 29 '11 at 15:43

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closed as not constructive by random♦ Nov 24 '11 at 14:48

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Umh, and who exactly told you that bandwidth is absolutely not an issue for huge companies? Having worked at Microsoft, and currently being at Amazon, I can guarantee you that bandwidth is indeed a huge issue for the companies, as it [gasp!] costs money. A lot of it. :-)

Meanwhile, even if you find an RSS reader (or write one, which would be more on topic here on SO :-)), it is likely that at some point the server will either throttle your requests, or will just respond with a cached response that will expire in 10-15 minutes, thus invalidating your attempts to refresh every 10s.

On a side note - RSS was not designed and is not suitable for (near) real-time polling.

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You'd be surprised how many serves allow getting pounded :) 5req/s is hardly something to throttle ... anyway, considering the RSS feed might only be generated at ~ the speed of it's minimum TTL, in which case the additional requests may just be useless, all silliness aside. – pst Jan 29 '11 at 8:25
Trust me, this particular websites' feeds can and do change their contents within seconds and I'm sure they expect people to use them like this as it kind of comes with their business territory and how they make money. Thanks for the rss lesson though! – skyoverflow2341 Jan 29 '11 at 10:52
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up vote 1 down vote

There is probably no way of achieving this without the help of the publishing website. If they support the PubSubHubbub protocol, then, yes, you can have updates within a couple second of the publish time. If not, then you can forget it. Even big companies will eventually block you if you're too agressive.

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up vote 1 down vote

Feed Notifier allows very fast polling, and is built specifically for notification purposes. (Popup and sound alert)

Feed Notifier is a Windows application that resides in the system tray and displays pop-up notifications on your desktop when new items arrive in your subscribed RSS or Atom feeds.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you want to control the refresh time, you can use any reader and get a plugin for your browser that auto refreshes. I have feedly pinned in Chrome and it auto updates every 10 seconds.

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