When PubSubHubbub launched at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, pretty much everyone in the audience immediately recognized it as a very cool thing. Basically, it takes any feed and significantly speeds up the time it takes to be found by various sources using new hubs that specifically gather that information. But the biggest fan of it may be the company that employs the two who created it, Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick: Google.
Today, Google has announced yet another service that is PubSubHubbub-compatible: Google Alerts. That’s huge not just because alerts can now appear in real-time in feed readers, but also because developers can now write applications that take advantage of getting pinged immediately when a new result for a certain query shows up in Google Search results, as Slatkin notes today on the Google Code Blog. “Think of it as an AJAX search API that tells *you* when it finds new results. Acting upon these notifications your app could update your website, email friends, send an SMS — the possibilities are endless,” Slatkin writes.
Slatkin hopes that new breeds of applications are created based on the protocol. That could well happen, but for now, Google seems content to use it on an increasing number of their products. Aside from Google Alerts, PubSubHubbub is already working on FeedBurner, Google Reader Shared Items and Blogger. As Fitzpatrick noted at our event, “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.” Google may not be the center of the world for PubSubHubbub, but it is the key cog moving it forward for now.
So what Google product may be next to turn on PubSubHubbub? Here’s a list of possible ones, Slatkin pointed us to, noting that many are far from certain at this point still.
The most significant thing Google could do to make blogs real-time is to fix Feedburner.
Agreed. Their follower count is still all over the place.
F*k..Everytime I read an article about this Pubbbsubbub, I get highly annoyed..Couldn’t they find a better name for this piece of crap!
Cool!!
That is cool! Image how much faster your content can get indexed. Yes there is pinging but from the sound of it it’s the value of feeds but on steroids.
Content isn’t getting indexed any faster, it’s just that once it gets indexed you can be notified of it faster… since the indexing is by far the slower piece of the puzzle compared to the alert this doesn’t seem to be too big of a deal. If Google releases some sort of real-time indexing then this would be more interesting.
Why can’t gmail be more real time instead of relying on refreshes every minute or so?
I thought gmail was already real time?
definitely not… see the “Refresh” link at the top?
Because you don’t like downtime.
That name is awesome!
Well, maybe Brad says “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.” But in practice, who else uses that?
I am afraid it *is* “that sort of crap”.
Google is putting a lot of efforts in making blog-feeds real time. In case I am not a part of any of the listed products can I still hook in to the Hub and make my feed discovery faster?
Very cool that it’s done faster now. Great for companies who need to monitor mentions of their company name, and for trademark owners.
Can’t we think of a sensible name for once? I mean, first “www” (9 syllables, hello! why not just “web”?), then, then EEEEEEEEEPC and now this.
Why doesn’t Google create an API for Google Reader?
I love that these new initiatives are actually being used by a company as large as Google, and isn’t being locked away behind some proprietary protocol.
Looking forward to integrating this tech into my app.
This looks cool
Cool!
Right now archiving of web information was a batch process? In simple english – does this mean that we will get an alert as soon as something is updated on the web? – we won’t have to wait for google bot/crawler to crawl the webspace to get updated information. A step closer to real time web search? – Sorry, not so familiar with all the tech. jargons.
F*k..Everytime I read an article about this Pubbbsubbub, I get highly annoyed..Couldn’t they find a better name for this piece of crap!
BTW I love your blog!