MCP is not (quite) RSS

RSS is a technology I have relied on for years.

One of the first things I do each day is use Inoreader to go through updates to nearly 200 websites. It takes me less than 10 minutes and is actually how I came across the article MCP is RSS for AI.

The premise is that MCP could be following a similar path to RSS due to the simplicity of it’s protocol.

It has a nice high level explanation of how MCP works - effectively a bunch of checks for keywords that then map the arguments that follow to pass to a tool to handle it.

However there is a key difference between the two protocols it doesn’t touch on.

Most RSS feeds are created once and can be consumed by anyone. Once the file exists it is only updated when a change happens and the overhead of hosting it is minimal. In the case of MCP there are potential complications, depending on what the MCP call does.

There could be a cost to the execution of an MCP call as it is likely to involve some form of processing. It is also more likely to be behind some form of security to reduce the overhead of that execution multiple times and also in some cases restrict access to data behind it.

Having said that, maybe MCP has the simplicity to become as easy to include and consume as RSS has been. We will have to wait and see.

Links

MCP Is RSS for AI: More Use Cases for Model Context Protocol