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.
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.
That's my impression. With the Wordpress implementation, I believe rsscloud.org is hosting the central server.
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3555/theres-reason-rsscl...