14 DAY TRIAL // RSS feeds are so yesterday when you have things like Twitter, right? That seems to be the 'popular' belief, but there are those who still believe in the ancient technology and who are working on upgrading it to keep up with the increasing need for faster news and real-time content. Enter PubSubHubbub (PuSH), an open protocol that is designed to get a feed to subscribers as fast as possible, in terms of seconds. The protocol has been gaining support and WordPress.com has just announced that it has enabled it for all 10.5 million blogs it hosts, a huge step forward for PuSH.
"From the tongue twisting name department we welcome PubSubHubbub, or as some people have shortened it to: PuSH. Like rssCloud, PuSH is a way for services that subscribe to updates from your blog (think Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes) to get updates even faster," Joseph Scott of WordPress.com explained.
"In most cases these updates are sent out within a second or two of when you hit the publish button. Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts," he announced.
What it means is that feed subscribers to any of the blogs hosted by WordPress.com will get notified instantly when their favorite blogs post something new, if they use a feed reader that supports PuSH, like Google Reader, anyway. The new feature is already live, so WordPress.com users are already taking advantage of it. If you're hosting your own blog using WordPress software, you can install the new PuSHPress plugin to get access to the same functionality.
PuSH is a real-time web protocol designed to completely revamp the way feeds get published. Until now, feed clients would ping a blog or a site every so often to see if there is anything new. This introduced a noticeable lag between the time an article would be published and the time it landed in people's feed readers, sometimes even hours. PuSH changes things over. Both the publisher and the reader connect to a central hub. When a new piece is published, the hub is notified immediately. The hub server then notifies all the subscribers that there's something new and the entire process usually doesn't take more than a few seconds.