Friday, July 10, 2009

My first PubSubHubbub test

Eddie Awad and Mark Krynsky are Facebook friends, and I noticed that they were sharing items about PubSubHubbub and real-time blog feeds. So I investigated. From Google:

Today we're happy to announce initial support in FeedBurner for the PubSubHubbub protocol. 'Hubbub is an open specification in draft for web-scale publish and subscribe. The protocol can be used to transform any existing Atom and RSS feed on the web into a real-time stream.

Google then provided these instructions to Feedburner and AdSense users:

As of right now, burned feeds with the PingShot service enabled are automatically enhanced with the PubSubHubbub protocol. We'll add the required discovery elements to these feeds and notify a Google-run Hub, running on App Engine, of publish events. We also convert any pings we receive into 'Hubbub events. That means for many of our publishers out there, your existing feeds are available as real-time streams right now. Like, immediately. This very moment.

If you are a publisher and are not already using our PingShot service, turning it on is easy. From feedburner.google.com, visit the Publicize tab for your feed, select PingShot, and click the [Activate] button at the bottom of the page. From your AdSense account, go to Manage Ads, then click View Feed Stats link, and do the same thing. That's it.


As of now, I did the Feedburner step - I apparently didn't need to do the AdSense step, because it was already done. I think.

The proof is in the pudding, since I will check the service provided by this ex-Googler, who was also raving about PubSubHubbub:

FriendFeed also added support for the technology, so if you have a FeedBurner feed, your updates should show up in FriendFeed within seconds rather than minutes after the feed updates.

Well, we're about to find out.

[UPDATE 1:22 PM - AS I NOTED IN THE COMMENTS TO THIS FRIENDFEED THREAD, THIS POST TOOK SEVEN MINUTES TO SHOW UP IN FRIENDFEED. FOR A JUST-INTRODUCED TECHNOLOGY, NOT BAD. PRESUMABLY THIS WILL BE REFINED AS TIME PASSES.]
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