Blogspotting has posted a conversation Heather Green had with Scott Gatz. In it she writes that

And Gatz imagines amping that up so that you can get these alerts delivered to you when and where you want, whether it’s on your cell phone or even in your living room over a settop box. So, say, if a Soho apartment in the right range comes up for sale and you’re in Central Park uptown, an alert would be sent automatically to your phone, allowing you to scoot downtown and take a gander.

Ok so that sounds fine and pretty cool to me but I’m getting a little confused . . .

Then comes this line. . .

Still, Gatz doesn’t think that centralized services go away completely.

Ok now I’m confused. In fact for the above scenerio to happen a centralized service will almost HAVE to exist. If I’m not mistaken, RSS is a pull architecture. It would be almost improbably inefficient for a cellphone app to ping the RSS feed every 10 sec to get updates on SOHO housing prices. Furthermore, the RSS feed will have no way of uniquely identifying the feed request and thus serving up a personalized listings. What needs to happen is for the RSS feed service to ping ONE centralized server that new content has been added/updated, the server will comeback and grab ALL the new content, then it will selectively push that content (using a proprietary protocol) to subscribers who wants a portion of that content (such as houses in a certain price range).

Maybe Scott is planning to implement proprietary RSS feeds or proprietary applications to create some sort of barrier to entry for Yahoo! (which is the central server scenerio I described). OR he is assuming that a authentication & push implementation of RSS is going to be part of RSS 3.0. In that case, I am eargerly waiting for the future - free and open.