

WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud - adamhowell
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_just_made_millions_of_blogs_real-time_wi.php

======
blasdel
Summary: For some reason Matt Mullenweg started paying attention to Dave
Winer. It's one of the worst ideas he's ever had, _and he's the idiot who
wrote Wordpress_ , so that's really saying something.

After a year or so of uselessness and a few epic flameouts from Dave, they'll
probably implement PubSubHubBub on Wordpress.com, and rightfully not waste
effort trying to make it work for self-hosters. With any luck, they'll stop
serving duplicate feeds and go pure Atom at the same time.

~~~
photomatt
Wow no reason to be so angry -- it's just some pings going back and forth.
There's no need to make it personal. Besides, I've had way worse ideas.

We've always planned to have a variety of update notifications available --
the first we did was Jabber/XMPP, now RSS Cloud, after this we'll do some
others. I mentioned this in my post on the subject, which you can check out
here:

<http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/>

We've supported other things before, like Atom Publishing, that to this day
get almost no use (literally less than but we support them anyway because it
can't hurt and might help. In general I would consider myself API- and format-
agnostic.

~~~
blasdel
The vitriol on my part was due to the Winerian aspect -- the man has a long
history of fucking up everything he touches technically, and vindictively
fucking over anyone less than sycophantic. _Run away._

APP doesn't see much use in Wordpress because nobody uses desktop blogging
clients anymore. However, it is widely implemented on both sides (even
Microsoft!), something that will never be true for <cloud>.

'RSSCloud' is inelegant, idiotically-designed (he thinks traditional SOAP
posted to a resourcey URL is REST!), doesn't help centralized aggregators
scale, doesn't work with NATed clients, and worst of all it was specced/never-
implemented/forgotten by Dave Winer 8 years ago. At least you were smart
enough not to use rpc.rsscloud.org -- Winer can't be trusted to host anything
for anyone (eg: weblogs.com).

Google, Bloglines, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. will never implement it. The
only people <cloud> could possibly help would be the few running their own
server-side aggregators. Implementing PubSubHubBub would actually help people
-- doing this just feeds Winer's ego (and thus pumps up the drama).

Why the hell were you still serving duplicate RSS2 at all anyway? The only
extant feedreaders that don't grok Atom were written by Winer (and he's the
only user left!).

~~~
photomatt
Last month we got 688,000 new blog posts via XML-RPC, so desktop clients are
still meaningful. (XML-RPC API is also used by other folks like Flickr.) APP
may be better, I don't have a strong opinion, but it's hardly used and in fact
we had trouble finding clients to test with when writing support for it.
Regardless, we try to have the best support for APP possible.

Same thing with feeds -- we offer every feed in a choice of 4 formats (two
Atoms, two RSSes). It's the same content and there's no overhead to us (it's
just a template file) so why not let people choose what they like best.

------
hachiya
Brett Slatkin on the difference between PubSubHubBub and rssCloud:

from <http://jy.typepad.com/jy/2009/07/pubsubhubbub-rsscloud.html>:

In a nut-shell, rssCloud's subscriptions are merely a way of redistributing
pings to subscribers. We think this is still on the publishing side of the
problem and does not simplify the life of a subscriber. With rssCloud,
subscribers must re-fetch the feed to see if it's changed. In contrast, Hubbub
delivers the actual changes to the subscriber so they have no more work to do.
This makes it much easier to subscribe, and has some nice properties when it
comes to scalability.

------
Mystalic
It won't mean anything if they can't convince RSS readers (specifically Google
Reader) to adopt it.

~~~
frognibble
Google Reader adopted PubSubHubBub. PubSubHubBub is similar to RSSCloud, but
fixes many issues with RSSCloud.

------
look_lookatme
Still waiting on the Feedmesh...

------
Tichy
Isn't Ping pretty much realtime, too?

------
_ck_
So in plain english without all the hype, it's RSS pushed from the server
instead of pulled by the client.

How are they doing it over http without thousands of connections being open
and closed constantly on the server per second? Are they just announcing to a
central server and the client only polls the one server for any one of
thousands of blogs they could be subscribed to?

I guess I'll look at the code tomorrow.

~~~
jaaron
The client has to have a public internet port available for XML-RPC or an HTTP
post. The central cloud server sends pings to all of the subscribers.

It's a bad idea.

If you're going to do this, just use XMPP. Otherwise, use HTTP the way it was
intended and just have the client poll the server. Why does everyone think
this is such a bad idea? Polling works. It scales. It's simple.

~~~
mseebach
I agree on XMPP, but there's a certain amount of pressure to keep this working
entirely inside the web-stack as much of the blog-community (and especially
the Wordpress community) relies on fairly limited shared LAMP hosting, where
XMPP running in the background (or anything else, for that matter) just isn't
available.

Of course, the cleaner solution is to make this XMPP "inside" for thos who can
use that, and then make a XMPP-to-HTTP frontend for those who can't. But on
the other hand, there's a good point in keeping things simple.

