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SUP (Simple Update Protocol) is a simple and compact "ping feed" that web services can produce in order to alert the consumers of their feeds when a feed has been updated. This reduces update latency and improves efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent polling.

SUP is being developed by FriendFeed.

Benefits include:

  • Simple to implement. Most sites can add support with only few lines of code if their database already stores timestamps.
  • Works over HTTP, so it's very easy to publish and consume.
  • Cacheable. A SUP feed can be generated by a cron job and served from a static text file or from memcached.
  • Compact: updates can be about 21 bytes each. (8 bytes with gzip encoding)
  • Does not expose usernames or secret feed urls (such as Google Reader Shared Items feeds)

Resources:

The following services support SUP:

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