14 DAY TRIAL // With everyone quick to jump on the “RSS is dead” bandwagon, WordPress.com decided to give the aging spec a shot at fighting the “real-time” war, which, for now, is being won by Twitter, if only on hype and sheer size. A new feature called RSSCloud has been implemented by the blog-hosting service, which makes the updates from all WordPress.com blogs show up in real time in the feed readers that support it. There are only a few readers at the time that do this, River2 and, apparently, LazyFeed too. The feature is also available for any WordPress installation using a plug-in.
“Why is this important? Right now how most people interact with feeds is by checking that it updated every now and then, usually about once an hour. Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails? (The world would probably be more productive.) RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say 'Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.',” the official announcement from WordPress.com reads.
RSS allows users to subscribe to a blog or a website to receive updates automatically whenever the site has something new. But, because of the way the technology currently works, there is a delay between the time the content is posted and when it reaches a user's feed reader, a few minutes to a few hours, but usually between 15 and 60 minutes. With Twitter updating almost instantly and more and more services becoming real-time, blogs and sites relying on RSS have been falling behind.
The RSSCloud feature works by changing the way feeds get to their destination. RSS feeds work by having the reader constantly poling the server to see if there is an update. With the new feature, which isn't actually that new, having been in the RSS spec since 2001, the updates are pushed to the subscribers via a cloud server in real time.
There is a number of other initiatives to make RSS/Atom feeds real-time, or at least significantly faster, most notably Google's PubSubHubbub. In fact, WordPress.com has said it will implement a number of push technologies in the future, among them the Google-backed technology, so it will be interesting to see which comes first, Google Reader's support for RSSCloud or WordPress.com's support for PuBSubHubbub. If this feature, or other similar technologies, gets some traction and support, it could really change the way the “real-time web” is viewed today.