PubSubHubbub and the Real Time Web, Are We There Yet?

I remember being so excited when I found out about RSS. Also known as Really Simple Syndication, it allows readers to automatically pull information in from a variety of sources, rather than having to manually visit different Web sites, for example, to see if something is new. For writers, it is a really simple way to push content to readers, without having to rely solely on an email push that might get lost in a cluttered inbox. As it turns out, RSS alone wasn’t pushy enough. Now there is something called the PubSubHubbub, or PuSH, protocol that works faster and more efficiently. Here’s a video that gives a very basic explanation:

Better yet, it’s available as a WordPress plugin. You can read more about that in this article from the WordPress blog. There also is a another protocol called rssCloud that supplements plain old RSS. You can read about the difference between PuSH and rssCloud in this article from TechCrunch.