PubSubHubBub - feed futures

Cool - Bob Wyman is involved in the PubSubHubBub discussion group. In this post he hints at content-based routing - not just topic based routing - being possible in the future with PSHB. It's time to find some excuse to use this new PSHB technology at my day job.

For instance, while today we think mostly about "topic-based" distribution -- i.e. subscribing to known feeds by name, in the future, people might like to subscribe to "concepts" or "words" that appear in the content of updates. Rather than saying "Tell me whenever Tom's feed changes!", you might like to say: "Tell me whenever any feed mentions PSHB." In that case, down stream systems are going to want to have the content (not just a notification of change) in order to match updates to subscriptions.

Real-time web, take 2

Bernard Lunn has a good post over on ReadWriteWeb putting the recent PubSubHubBub/RSSCloud news into context. Very funny that he calls KnowNow a "blow out", but I think he correctly identified their issue being a focus on the enterprise market (when that market had fairly established solutions).

Wish I hadn't been so busy over the past two years and could have worked on helping build PubSubHubBub-style technology.

Real-time Web just around the corner

The ReadWriteWeb blog has a good post about gathering momentum for a resurgence of interest in real-time search and notifications. I don't think the examples he points to will push it into the mainstream - that functionality has been around in many forms for many years (I even built searchalert.net seven or eight years ago to do that). I do think something will happen, but I'm not sure what application of this technology will make it to the big time.

The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing. Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed.