Last week there was an outage on NewsGator Online. This outage didn't just affect people who use the NewsGator Online but also users of their desktop readers such as FeedDemon which synchronize the users feed state between the desktop and the web-based reader.

In his post Dealing with Connectivity Issues in Desktop Applications Nick Bradbury writes

One of the more frustrating challenges when designing a desktop application that connects to the Internet is figuring out how to deal with connectivity issues caused by firewalls, proxy servers and server outages.
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And as we discovered last week, when your application relies on a server-side API, it has to be able to deal with the server being unavailable without significantly impacting the customer. This was something FeedDemon 2.0 failed to do, and I have to take the blame for this. Because of my poor design, synchronized feeds couldn't be updated while our server was down, and to make matters worse, FeedDemon kept displaying a "synchronization service unavailable" message every time it tried to connect - so not only could you not get new content, but you were also bombarded with error messages you could do nothing about.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post entitled The Newsgator API Continues to Frustrate Me where I complained about the fact that Newsgator Online assumes that clients that synchronize with it actually just fetch all their data from Newsgator Online including feed content. This is a bad design decision because it means that they expected all desktop clients who synchronize with the web-based reader to have a single point of failure. As someone who's day job is working on the platforms that power a number of Windows Live services, I know from experience that service outages are a fact of life. In addition, I also know that you don't want clients making requests to your service unless they absolutely have to. This is not a big deal at first but once you get enough clients you start wanting them to do as much data retrieval and processing as they can without hitting your service. Having a desktop feed reader rely on a web service for fetching feeds instead of having it fetch feeds itself needlessly increases the costs of running your online service and doesn't buy your customers a significantly improved user experience. 

I've bumped into Greg Reinacker since I complained about the Newsgator API and he's been adamant about the correctness of their design decisions. I hope the fallout from the recent outage makes them rethink some of the design of Newsgator's RSS platform.