Eat Fresh

Image via Wikipedia

Google have announced that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items.

I really rate the name of the protocol, it reminds me of the Sub-of-the-Day from the Subway Restaurant Menu. PubSubHubbub is definitely speeding up RSS. Eat fresh, speed in the feed, Google Reader adopting this protocol allows us to digest the latest shared stories in real time.

All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there's a < link rel="hub" > element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

Check out the embedded YouTube demonstration below which shows how fast updates are pulled into Friendfeed.

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