It's the solution to all your RSS bandwidth over usage. In 10 seconds, start saving your bandwidth! We support RSS 0.91, 2.0, Atom, RDF and more!
Apparently they read a given RSS or Atom feed for you (just insert my.rsscache.com/ after the http:// in a URL) and track your IP address. Once you've requested the same feed five or so times, they'll empty it until something new is posted. This reduces user's inbound bandwidth usage. A blog owner can modify the URLs for her feeds, and readers will then benefit from the caching service without taking special action.
Naturally, I wanted to know, cui bono? who benefits from this (or, better, how does RSScache/D2Soft win)? Apparently they will sell a suitably-scaled version of the caching service to site-owners, expecting to reduce their bandwidth usage (and resulting overcharges) substantially. For instance, they'd reduce the monthly bandwidth usage of my feed from around 600MB to 50MB (based on 60K hits/month, which I haven't seen (I have 40K hits over the last year on the whole site).
I found it funny that the feed they used to e-mail me was one that was abandoned a few years ago.
Update: I also wondered if RSScache might insert ads into the feed, which seem's to be the question in McGee's Musings about Engadget.
Posted by ronlusk at October 15, 2004 02:13 PM