Victus Spiritus

home

Rsscloud goes nuclear!

09 Sep 2009

There has been some debate recently about the long term utility of rss technology. Nevermind the fact that the protocol and communication method aren't vanishing mysteriously anytime soon. In fact the opposite is happening, innovation for real time information distribution is happening somewhere between the mind of folks like Dave Winer, and the keyboard (my personal link failure). Wordpress (thanks Matt and team, specifically the pluggin author) has embraced the RSSCloud with plans on supporting variants of realtime distribution. RSSCloud has been a long time in the making, and it's predecessor concepts stretch back to the dark ages of the web (2001, not the Space Odyssey, the spooky bubble bursting days). William Mougayar does a splendid job of explaining some of the benefits of Rsscloud and the still existing hurdle(s) to widespread adoption (ahem.. Google Reader I'm looking at you). William was using similar precursor tech back in 2003 and has even created an incredible information discovery tool. It's like magic but rational, read up on eqentia, William and his team are working hard on making the front end user friendly. I'm a big fan of semantic information filtering tools and their curators.

Rsscloud is not alone, it shares functionality with pubhubsubbub, or for lazy smart phone typers like me phsb. Basically these information distribution systems ping folks who subscribe, but in a brilliant distributed manner so there can be a bazillion hubs all forwarding the ping (phsb pings might be larger, tech gurus please feel free to correct the hell outta this). Now we have an entire coupled web, I post you read, just like that. But if any node should go down, say facebook or twitter, all of us can keep on sharing information in near real time. The latency is not quite instant, but if geeks can do it, they will find an implementation that gets you this blogs rss feed before I finish writing it ;). I'd appreciate any and all the helpful feedback.