• I deleted my Twitter account a few months ago but I still follow friends via RSS.
• I follow the local news via RSS.
• I follow the latest traffic updates via RSS (no, I’m not but it's a good example).

These are all traffic intensive RSS feeds with a few tens to a few hundred posts a day and most of these posts are only useful for a certain amount of time. Sometimes you are only interested in the most recent posts in a feed, old news is, well, old news. What my friends were doing yesterday may be irrelevant today and the traffic situation at 9 in the morning is useless in the evening.

I don’t want to open my RSS reader to press the “Mark all as read” button every time. Wouldn’t it be great to have a ‘lifespan’ for certain RSS items? Let’s say the latest traffic update is only valid news for 2 hours and my friends Twitter update could last a full day? After this timeframe the RSS reader could mark this post as ‘old’ or ‘read’.

Meet the disposable RSS feeds!

I could think of extending the RSS specification with a TTL something (like TCP/IP packets) where the author can suggest how long his post should ‘live’. On the other hand, it could be up to the RSS reader developers to add something like this in their software as the reader may want to decide how relevant older items are for him as opposed to the author of the post. The latter is probably easier to implement.

Does something like this exist? Would it be useful