Did Google Reader Just Turn on the Firehose? - Stay N Alive

Did Google Reader Just Turn on the Firehose?

Posted on by jessestay

Google’s big push recently has been on enabling open, real-time technologies to publish, read, and interact with its new service Buzz.  Reader, its RSS subscription and website reading service, is one of the biggest tools to integrate with the service.  So much that my Reader contacts are now my Buzz contacts.  Until now, Google Reader, while when it would share your posts, it would send updates to subscribing services via Pubsub Hubbub (PSHB), it did not support the reading end of it for supported blogs that publish via PSHB.

Just after my last post on Google ironically, I noticed immediately after publishing people were sharing my post, something very unusual for the service, which usually takes up to an hour for my posts to show up on the site.  Going into Reader, I noticed it had immediately recognized my post.  I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”.  Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

WordPress-enabled Blogs that want to be seen immediately after publishing in Google Reader just need to install Josh Fraser’s Pubsub Hubbub plugin for WordPress.  After hitting publish, your post should appear immediately afterwards in PSHB-supported clients, which, if I am correct, now includes Google Reader’s massive user base.

If this is true, you should see this post immediately after I hit publish in Google Reader.  Assuming I’m right (which it seems so), Robert Scoble’s concern of it taking too long to get news (#5) just went out the door today – he can now get this just as fast, if not faster than any service such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or Buzz, and this way, he gets to read the full content of the article.  When I hit publish on this post you will see it immediately.  You are subscribed to my feeds, right?

UPDATE: Just after hitting publish it appeared immediately in Google Reader on this post as well.  I’m 99.9% sure now that PSHB was launched on Google Reader today.

Image courtesy http://www.scotduke.com/getting-a-drink-out-of-a-fire-hose/

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28 thoughts on “Did Google Reader Just Turn on the Firehose?”

  13. Note to anybody using Feedburner: Turn on Pingshot and you're Pubsubhubbub enabled.

    Note to anybody using Feedburner with WordPress: Also add http://ping.feedburner.com to your Update Services list in Settings->Writing. This will make your blog ping Feedburner to notify it of new posts, to make it notice them faster.

    Reply

  15. This works for Reader, but if you want real-time Buzz updates from your
    blog, you need the PSHB plugin, because (so I'm told) Buzz pings the main
    feed URL for your site and not Feedburner. I know when I didn't have it
    enabled it wouldn't update Buzz real-time, but when I enabled the plugin
    updates would go real-time.

    Reply

  18. You know “stay n' alive” means “stay and alive”. Is that what you meant? I bet you meant “stayin' alive”.

    Reply

  21. Jenna, you're welcome – be sure to check out Otto's suggestions above as well if you use Feedburner to track your subscriptions. It may be even simpler than I have made it out to be.

    Reply

  24. I've been doing some testing over the last month or so. My results are thus:

    If you use FeedBurner, then turning on PingShot will indeed give you instant PSHB functionality. However, FeedBurner actually polls your normal feed for updates, so until FeedBurner polls you, you get no updates. This reduces the “instant” aspect of the thing.

    If you don't use FeedBurner, then this plugin for WordPress works best: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pushpress/ . It's a PubSubHubBub plugin, but one which includes its own Hub part. So you're not relying on anybody else's services to send out the updates. With this plugin, I see under-a-minute update times to services that can use it.

    Reply

  25. I've been doing some testing over the last month or so. My results are thus:

    If you use FeedBurner, then turning on PingShot will indeed give you instant PSHB functionality. However, FeedBurner actually polls your normal feed for updates, so until FeedBurner polls you, you get no updates. This reduces the “instant” aspect of the thing.

    If you don't use FeedBurner, then this plugin for WordPress works best: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pushpress/ . It's a PubSubHubBub plugin, but one which includes its own Hub part. So you're not relying on anybody else's services to send out the updates. With this plugin, I see under-a-minute update times to services that can use it.

    Reply

  28. You know “stay n' alive” means “stay and alive”. Is that what you meant? I bet you meant “stayin' alive”.

    Reply

  29. This works for Reader, but if you want real-time Buzz updates from your
    blog, you need the PSHB plugin, because (so I'm told) Buzz pings the main
    feed URL for your site and not Feedburner. I know when I didn't have it
    enabled it wouldn't update Buzz real-time, but when I enabled the plugin
    updates would go real-time.

    Reply

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