RSS, once the most popular publish/subscribe system is believed to have come to an end due to reasons unexplored yet. The aim of this thesis is to examine one such reason, spamming. The context of this thesis is limited to spamming related to RSS v2.0. The study discusses RSS as a publish/subscribe system and investigates the possible reasons for the decline in the use of such a system and possible solutions to address RSS spamming. The thesis introduces RSS (being dependent on feed readers) and tries to find its relationship with spamming. In addition, the thesis tries to investigate possible socio-technical influences on spamming in RSS.
The author presents the idea of applying formalization (formal specification technique) to open standards, RSSv2.0 in particular. Formal specifications are more concise, consistent, unambiguous and highly reusable in many cases. The merging of formal specification methods and open standards allows for i) a more concrete standard design, ii) an improved understanding of the environment under design, iii) an enforced certain level of precision into the specification, and also iv) provides software engineers with extended property checking/verification capabilities. The author supports and proposes the use of formalization in RSS.
Based on the inferences gathered from the user experiment conducted during the course of this study, an analysis on the downfall of RSS is presented. However, the user experiment opens up different directions for future work in the evolution of RSS v3.0 which could be supported by formalization. The thesis concludes that RSS is on the verge of death/discontinuation due to the adverse effects of spamming and lack of its development which is evident from the limited amount of available research literature.
RSS Feeds is a perfect example of what happens to a software if it fails to evolve itself with time
