Comments on: The protocols powering the real-time web

By: Head to head: PubSubHubbub vs. rssCloud

Head to head: PubSubHubbub vs. rssCloud — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:54:08 +0000

[…] The post I wrote was titled RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win and was really a follow up to my previous post on The protocols powering the real-time web. […]

By: Choosing your audience

Choosing your audience — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:03:40 +0000

[…] along a good bit of traffic, but I also enjoy writing posts that will never be found via Google. The protocols powering the real-time web doesn’t get much traffic from Google, but the discussion that post generated was amazing. […]

By: Michael Lewkowitz

Michael Lewkowitz — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:48:06 +0000

Interesting Josh. I've been thinking about this too from a bit of a different perspective – as in what would a coordinated effort look like to create a common infrastructure. This is a core problem for this emerging medium and something that might more easily be addressed like Visa did back in the 70's – having a bunch of independents coming together to solve a common problem. I've put up some initial thoughts up over at http://igniter.com/post428.

By: JChauncey

JChauncey — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:13:24 +0000

By having a centralized hub (unlike PSHB's decentralized model) that consumes the various formats of information and then allows people to build and subscribe to streams in any format they wish will help with adoption of the lesser known formats (XMPP being one of them).

and I definitely check out suprfeedr – Although parsing RSS isnt too big of a problem… But it would help to offload that to someone.

By: JChauncey

JChauncey — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:01:24 +0000

Gnip is a great solution to a problem like this. The only thing is that they control who they poll. I really want to create a central repository of feeds (initially) that people contribute to it socially. Allow them to rank and categorize those feeds
and then allow my servers to consume the information.

From there people can create their own streams using a combination of keywords and topics. Then subscribe to that stream using a number of delivery mechanisms.

The reason why I want to do it this way, is that I have a real problem with the way content is distrubted. I can only consume feeds I find and then I have to receive the articles from that feed that I may not want to read (not relevant to my need).

I am still looking to see if there are ways to make this a bit easier (architecturally) and I think that pubsubhubbub may work. Just need to do a bit more research.

By: julien

julien — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:17:11 +0000

In reply to JChauncey.

Hey JChauncey,

Feel free to make any feedback/request/comment about superfeedr ([email protected]). Our goal is really to make things easy and remove the hassle from the thousands of websites/webserivces who actually need to poll feeds.

By: Josh Fraser

Josh Fraser — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:16:35 +0000

In reply to JChauncey. Sounds like you might be interested in http://superfeedr.com that was linked to above. They don't solve the polling problem, but they deal with it so you don't have to. If you're just looking for a firehose of blog feeds, you might also want to take a look at the google blogsearch changes.xml file. PSHB would be a good distribution method for people to subscribe to the various keyword/topic feeds.

By: julien

julien — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:06:00 +0000

In reply to Josh Fraser.

Hey!

Ok, so I was saying that it was once (again!) a nice conversation about Real-Time… and unfortunately the war between pro and anti-XMPP is not over and everybody is standing on their position.

I tend to agree 100% that most of the time it is just better to keep protocols for what they were intended. Like you, and like a lot of people it seems I have spent a lot of time trying to 'tweak' existing stuff (namely HTTP stuff) to make things that XMPP does very very well. Unfortunately, for us, hackers, I guess it's always sexier to actually try to hack things, instead of taking the time to read (yes that is boring) the documentation.

I think that the XMPP crowd has a huge work to do to actually evangelize. Servers are now as easy to install as Apache (apt-get packages…) or Nginx. However, my understanding is that there is a lack of easy libraries/framework (check out babylon in Ruby : http://github.com/julien51/babylon/tree/master) and moreover, a lack of great use-cases (besides chat…)

At http://superfeedr.com we have really been forced to acknowledge that XMPP *was* our solution and I see many many services around here that would definetely benefit from that.

As a conclusion, you guys should really check XMPP out. It is not that difficult and the community will be more than happy to help!

By: Josh Fraser

Josh Fraser — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:52:35 +0000

In reply to julien. I didn't moderate it. Can you please repost? Sorry about that.

By: julien

julien — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:43:49 +0000

Arg… my comment was eaten by IntenseDebate? Was it? Please tell me it's just being moderated. (I'll repost it of needed)