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PubSubHubbub vs RSSCloud

Real time updates have become the cause celeb of the internet recently, as the growth of micro blogging service Twitter can attest. Until just recently the approach to delivering realtime updates has been via the use of specific services, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the ability to provide these services was limited to those with the financial muscle to put together expensive infrastructure.

Google with Facebook acquired FriendFeed and Wordpress have both launched new content distribution models utilising two different protocols which enable real time updates to subscribers.

This week the most popular blogging engine – Wordpress – turned on support for RSS Cloud on all wordpress.com and wordpress.org hosted sites – immediately making it available on 7.5 million blogs, and WP also made a new plugin available which adds support for RSS Cloud to RSS feeds.

Google in association with Facebook acquired FriendFeed have created a protocol called PubSubHubbub which they have made completely open, and shared .

Both of these protocols make use of the Cloud, which gives cheap and easy access to high powered, scalable architecture that until the advent of cloud based computing was out of reach of most companies let alone individuals.

The idea is that the Publisher creates content and publishes it, a subscriber who has subscribed to the publishers content will be notified via a service that runs in the Cloud that the content has been updated, all this happens in real time – or in under a second. The link to the content is delivered via a push notification to the client, there is currently only one client that supports RSS Cloud but this will change. PubSubHubBub have created a bunch of client code examples and plugins (including one for wordpress).

The difference between these two protocols is minor in concept, both are open in nature, both are designed to deliver push notification and both utilise the cloud. The essential difference is that PubSubHubbub is focused on Atom and RSS Cloud, as the name suggests, on RSS. There will undoubtedly be conflicting opinions on which is best but it’s early days yet and it will be the successful implementation of clients that will determine the outcome of that argument.

What these new protocols deliver though is the opportunity to create richer and deeper real time conversations that support images and video natively, meaning a greater chance to understand what is happening right now. The potential for truly interactive news channels is what sprang to my mind with the possibility of combining multiple content channels into one stream,  with sound video and opinion being blended and controlled by the user rather than the publisher.

Tags: Cloud, Facebook, Friendfeed, google, Pubsubhubbub, RSS, RSSCloud, wordpress