The Wonders of PubSubHubbub

Some of you probably noticed that I blogged again for the first time since about three months yesterday. Well, that’s not really the spectacular news, mind you. But it was the first time I could make use of PubSubHubbub which was released in the meantime. And I was blown away!

PubSubHubbub is a fancy new protocol, created by some clever folks at Google. Basically, it allows anyone that supports it to get feeds (Atom and RSS) more or less in real time. Blog authors don’t have to wait for their blog to be crawled again by feed aggregators and the like until their new articles are distributed to all their feed subscribers.

Among other services, Feedburner and Friendfeed support the protocol already. So when I hit the Publish button in WordPress yesterday I didn’t remember PubSubHubbub or even that those services support it. After publishing the article I wanted to inform my followers on Twitter about the new article. But much to my surprise there already was a tweet by me about it.

What happened? Well, actually, it’s pretty simple: Feedburner got pinged and its PingShot service notified Friendfeed. In my Friendfeed settings I enabled that entries from my blog will be sent directly to Twitter (forgot about that setting as well, as you can imagine). Voilà, all this happened in a few seconds, long before I could even tweet the blog post myself.

All I can say is, PubSubHubbub is awesome! Check it out if you can. Also if you don’t want to use Feedburner you can download a WordPress plugin that will do the same.