WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
After a year or so of uselessness and a few epic flameouts from Dave, they'll probably implement PubSubHubBub on Wordpress.com, and rightfully not waste effort trying to make it work for self-hosters. With any luck, they'll stop serving duplicate feeds and go pure Atom at the same time.
We've always planned to have a variety of update notifications available -- the first we did was Jabber/XMPP, now RSS Cloud, after this we'll do some others. I mentioned this in my post on the subject, which you can check out here:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/
We've supported other things before, like Atom Publishing, that to this day get almost no use (literally less than but we support them anyway because it can't hurt and might help. In general I would consider myself API- and format-agnostic.
APP doesn't see much use in Wordpress because nobody uses desktop blogging clients anymore. However, it is widely implemented on both sides (even Microsoft!), something that will never be true for <cloud>.
'RSSCloud' is inelegant, idiotically-designed (he thinks traditional SOAP posted to a resourcey URL is REST!), doesn't help centralized aggregators scale, doesn't work with NATed clients, and worst of all it was specced/never-implemented/forgotten by Dave Winer 8 years ago. At least you were smart enough not to use rpc.rsscloud.org -- Winer can't be trusted to host anything for anyone (eg: weblogs.com).
Google, Bloglines, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. will never implement it. The only people <cloud> could possibly help would be the few running their own server-side aggregators. Implementing PubSubHubBub would actually help people -- doing this just feeds Winer's ego (and thus pumps up the drama).
Why the hell were you still serving duplicate RSS2 at all anyway? The only extant feedreaders that don't grok Atom were written by Winer (and he's the only user left!).
Same thing with feeds -- we offer every feed in a choice of 4 formats (two Atoms, two RSSes). It's the same content and there's no overhead to us (it's just a template file) so why not let people choose what they like best.
from http://jy.typepad.com/jy/2009/07/pubsubhubbub-rsscloud.html:
In a nut-shell, rssCloud's subscriptions are merely a way of redistributing pings to subscribers. We think this is still on the publishing side of the problem and does not simplify the life of a subscriber. With rssCloud, subscribers must re-fetch the feed to see if it's changed. In contrast, Hubbub delivers the actual changes to the subscriber so they have no more work to do. This makes it much easier to subscribe, and has some nice properties when it comes to scalability.
How are they doing it over http without thousands of connections being open and closed constantly on the server per second? Are they just announcing to a central server and the client only polls the one server for any one of thousands of blogs they could be subscribed to?
I guess I'll look at the code tomorrow.
That's my impression. With the Wordpress implementation, I believe rsscloud.org is hosting the central server.
It's a bad idea.
If you're going to do this, just use XMPP. Otherwise, use HTTP the way it was intended and just have the client poll the server. Why does everyone think this is such a bad idea? Polling works. It scales. It's simple.
Of course, the cleaner solution is to make this XMPP "inside" for thos who can use that, and then make a XMPP-to-HTTP frontend for those who can't. But on the other hand, there's a good point in keeping things simple.
I sense security issues in the making.
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3555/theres-reason-rsscl...