PubSubHubbub – The Real Time Web Comes to WordPress

Earlier this month, WordPress announced it had flipped the switch on PubSubHubbub for its 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, and began providing full support for anyone on WordPress.org too. Other than the silly name, I didn’t fully realize the gravity of this new functionality until I recently implemented it on my site.  But you might be asking: What exactly is PubSubHubbub?

Its basically a publishing/subscribing platform that essentially allows for nearly instantaneous communication between publishers and subscribers. You may be familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in which you subscribe to the “feed” of a dynamic web site, oftentimes a blog like this one. RSS makes it easy to read and keep up to date with blogs and news sites that interest the subscriber, and are  typically organized in a reader, such as Google Reader. The RSS reader then periodically checks the blog’s feed for new content, and then displays it to the subscriber once the publisher makes it available. The only trouble with this arrangement is that the whole process is not instantaneous. The reader checks the feed often for new content, but its a pull-based scenario. The reader won’t know you have new content until it goes and checks. What if the publisher could automatically notify the reader, and thus the subscriber, the instant that it posted something new? Thats PubSubHubbub.

In a world where we rely on social networking sites to give us real time information, RSS in its original form just can’t keep up. Enter PubSubHubbub (or the less silly sounding PuSH), which basically adds a hub between the publishers and subscribers of an RSS feed, that receives content from the publisher and pushes it to the subscriber. The hub basically acts like a messenger boy between the blog and their subscribers, and he can run fast. We all know how reliant the world has become on Twitter and other social networks to communicate online in the real time. For those situations where 140 characters just won’t cut it, PubSubHubbub becomes the  key to expanding the real time web to encompass blogs as well.

What it also means, I’ve discovered, is that search engines will treat your blog in much the same way as an RSS subscriber, and  will crawl your site almost immediately after an update is made. While this may not mean you will jump 6 spots in the organic search results the moment you post a new blog post, it means that you, the publisher, are able to vastly shorten the time-span between when you post content and when it gets found.

Right now the PuSH protocol only works for feed based content, meaning that your static HTML page won’t get this fancy feature in the near future. If you have a WordPress blog (and lets face it, you should), you can take full advantage of PubSubHubbub today. WordPress-hosted blogs (WordPress.com) automatically receive this new functionality,  and self-hosted blogs (WordPress.org) can install the no-nonsense PuSHPress plugin. WordPress is fast becoming the preferred content publishing platform on the web today, and this new PuSH functionality is just icing on the cake.

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