Now that Snap has announced the RSS Shot, we would like to share some technical details that might be of interest to our users and publishers.

The goal of the RSS Shot is to leverage information from feeds (RSS 1.0/2.0, Atom) we find when crawling the web, and use it to provide our users with a better idea of what content lies behind a particular link.

We have two methods of discovering these feeds:

1. by crawling pages as usual and noticing that they have feeds associated with them
2. by receiving pings through our own ping server, and asking major ping aggregators about recent pings they've seen. Our ping server accepts pings via XML-RPC at: http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2

If Snap receives a ping from a site, we may prioritize a refresh of that site's RSS Shot content. If a site does not ping us, we will make an educated guess as to when new content will appear, and schedule a refresh of the content for that time. If you are unhappy with the rate at which we refresh your site's RSS Shot content, we encourage you to ping us.

Finally, a note on coverage for the RSS Shot Expanded View mode. Some questions have been raised about why Snap shows RSS Shots for some links and Preview Shots for others, even on the same blog! The answer lies in the fact that since feeds tend to list recent entries from a site, older entries aren't discovered by our feed parser. For the time being we only provide RSS Shots for URLs discovered through these means.

Additional questions or feedback about the RSS Shot? We would love to hear from you in the comments or through our customer service/general feedback form here: http://www.snap.com/about/feedbk.php