PubSubHubbub is not a license | Hacker News Reader

PubSubHubbub is not a license

blog.superfeedr.com

43 pointsjulien15 comments

Here's the latest that I could find on why Twitter does not support PuSH: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/brow... None of the issues are related to licensing.

I have no idea why Twitter didn't use PubSubHubBub but isn't it fair to say PSHB is all about making it super easy to push the data around, subscribe to it, create a new PSHB node etc..?

...Those are all things Twitter (rightly/wrongly) DON'T want you to do. They want to make it difficult for you to sign up, they don't want you to push the data on etc -- this is based on their terms of use for this product (you can't even publish the tweets).

Ok technically you can do what you want with the data, but they presumably want to do everything from the Ts & Cs down to the architecture to ensure you stay as a leaf node and not easily become a super node.

"PSHB is all about making it super easy to push the data around, subscribe to it, create a new PSHB node"... when you're the publisher of this content! The PubSubHubbub protocol works with a discovery feature, which is a declaration _inside_ the feed themselves of where the hub is. If you can't modify the feed, you can't make a feed PubSubHubbub!

"...Those are all things Twitter (rightly/wrongly) DON'T want you to do. They want to make it difficult for you to sign up, they don't want you to push the data on etc -- this is based on their terms of use for this product (you can't even publish the tweets)." Then, why would they actually do all this with Gnip?

Then, why would they actually do all this with Gnip?

Because they have the Biz Dev resources to do it. It's all about the BD, this is nothing to do with technology.

This is all about the best way for Twitter to create $$ revenue as it ramps up for another fundraising round.

That I agree with :) It's a business concern, not a technical concern. I've just been told the opposite, so I thought it was a good thing to clarify it!

Again, it's a protocol not a license. Gnip won't solve this problem (of rebroadcasting) any better than PuSH.

On the other hand, PuSH seems relatively unadopted. I was working over the summer for a company evaluating PuSH and was writing my own Java Hub implementation since the only available reference impl requires GAE which isn't feasible for the data we were working with.

Unadopted? Wordpress, Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, Gowalla, Feedburner, Google Buzz, Blogger, Picasa, Youtube, HuffPost, Gawker Media, Status.net, Cliqset... and many many more publish PubSubHubbub feeds!

None of them are "selling" access though, all of them are trying to push with minimal friction where as Twitter is trying to introduce friction for BD sake.

Hum yes, some of them are selling access to their firehose or subsets of it via PubSubHubbub feeds! For example it's available to any Superfeedr hosted hub : http://blog.superfeedr.com/publisher-callback-and-track/ and we do it for a few of them.

Again, having some feeds that can be accessed for free doesn't mean that some others are not subject to fees or more complex TOS :)

So it seems... so where the hell are the OSS implementations of the Hub component?!

Here's one: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/source/browse/#svn/tru...

Yeah, I'm just surprised that the only one available requires GAE. Kind of a buzzkill for anyone who has data that can't be going around the Internet all willy-nilly.

I thought the proper acronym form of PubSubHubbub was PuSH (cf. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...).

I am probably wrong here, but I was under the impression that a HTTP based protocol like PSHB would probably struggle to manage traffic at the 1000's of messages per second level. Correct?

They will probably be rolling out a pure TCP (XMPP maybe) interface that should be more efficient.

Yep, I think the first commenter puts it well: "just like HTTP isn't a license"

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