Is there such a thing as IMAP for podcasts?
I own a desktop, laptop, iPod, smartphone and a web-client all downloading StackOverflow Podcasts. (among others) They all tell me which episodes are available and which are already played. Everything is a horrible mess, ofcourse. My iPod is somewhat in sync with my desktop, but everything else is a random jungle.
The same problem with e-mail is solved by IMAP. Every device gets content and meta-information from one server, and stays in sync with it. Per device, I can set preferences (do or do not download the complete archive including junkmail).
Can we implement the IMAP approach for podcasts? Or is there a better metaphore/standard to solve this problem? How will the adoption-strategy look like?
(by the way: except for the Windows smartphone, I own a full Apple-stack of products. Even then, I run into this problem)
UPDATE The RSS-to-Imap link to sourceforge looks promesting, but very alpha/experimental.
UPDATE 2 The one thing RSS is missing is the command/method/parameter/attribute to delete/unread items. RSS can only add, not remove. If RSS(N+1) (3?) could add a value for unread="true|false", it would be solved. If I cache all my RSS-feeds on my own server, and add the attribute myself, I only would have to convince iTunes and every other client to respect that.
Podcasts are basically just RSS, so an IMAP solution doesn't totally make sense in this case.
You'd have to have your own podcast stack in order to achieve something like this.