Hi!

I'm trying to understand how is small view supposed to work. In the absence of javascript support (and thus AJAX) I'm trying to work out the best way of handling the contents generation server-side. From what I understand small view has two modes:

- default view (same contents for all users) -- this is generally what I'd like BUT in the absence of OpenSocial XML application format support it seems like the only way to update default contents is to go to editor web page and copy/paste contents manually. This certainly cannot be the only way as it's unwise to expect that people would do that for frequently updated applications. This is question #1: is it the only way? Or can be small view contents hosted remotely / being automatically pushed to Yahoo! servers *once* for all users?

- personalized view (different for each user) -- while this view is supposedly designed to provide personalized contents I suspect it can be used to provide up-to-date, non-personalized content too; this is question #2: how do I make Yahoo! to automatically request a new contents... every hour? on each page reload? <yml:a replace=... tag is no good since it requires user to click. MyYahoo! applications like Company News do refresh their contents on each page reload and from time to time by themselves (I'm not sure about the latter but it seems to be the case).

Now putting all this into a bigger picture Let's suppose I want to publish an OpenSocial news application -- simple thing; it should display top 3 news stories from my web page. Let's suppose it's somewhat popular application and we've got a lot of users. Now we want to publish a story. Obviously requiring user to click to reload contents is not an option (nobody can expect that in year 2009, right ). So the only other option I know of would be to loop through all the users (!!!) and call setSmallView("new contents") for each one of them? Surely it's not what people are doing, right? This would be question #3: what am I missing?

Thanks for help,
Max