It is very exciting to see all the jazz about real-time data being available. It is however a little disappointing that the RSS vs. Atom war is starting again through the PubSubHubbub vs. RssCloud conflict (read Techcrunch’s post about that). Wordpress said they will adopt RssCloud, while Google massively adopted PubSubHubbub and SixApart showed strong interest for the latter.
The only little lie about that is that almost all of the data that you can access through these hubs or clouds, was actually already available through other Real-time (or close to real-time) means. SixApart has had an AtomStream for years, Google implemented the changes.xml syntax a few years ago and Wordpress announced last year that they had an XMPP stream with all the blog posts and comments.
Again, don’t get me wrong : this is really exciting that from having 1 technology for each provider we now have almost the same protocols across the board, but I think that proves also why we need services like Superfeedr : a huge part of the content that is published daily is not being pushed to anywhere.
Again, pushing your content to reduce the “polling” load makes sense, but we strongly believe that the vast majority of the data out there will probably never be pushed to any hub of cloud, and that’s precisely where Superfeedr is so useful!
Comments