Like the equation? Yesterday I wrote about RSS Cloud and the benefits it will have as it grows on the blogosphere. If you missed it you will want to read it first before reading this. I wrote about Wordpress plan to launch RSS Cloud to provide real-time RSS updates to all of it’s Wordpress.com bloggers. Then I talked about the plugin for the self-hosted Wordpress blogs that will enable you to do the same thing.

Right now RSS Cloud only works with two feed readers, River2 and Lazyfeed. But there are millions of people (including me) who use Google Reader. The word from Wordpress was “we expect them to follow”. But Google already has it’s own real-time RSS project and has so for quite some time. It’s called Pubsubhubbub.I knew this already, but before Software Engineer (and co-creator of Pubsubhubbub) at Google Brett Slatkin commented on my post yesterday I did not know that Pubsubhubbub is already enabled for over 100 million feeds world-wide! This is huge!

Pubsubhubbub Is Where The Excitement Should Be!

Not RSS Cloud. Here’s why. Imagine real-time RSS updates for everything Google! Feedburner, Google Reader, Google Alerts etc. This is huge! Your RSS Feed if it’s through Feedburner can now provide instant RSS. Your Google Reader can now receive instant RSS for other Feedburner feeds and Google Alerts that you are subscribed to.

How To Active Pubsubhubbub For Feedburner

In Feedburner the service is called PingShot that uses the Pubsubhubbub Protocol. You need to login to your Feedburner account to active it first in order to provide real-time updates through your RSS feed. Login and go to the Publicize tab. Then find the Pingshot menu item on the left and click Activate.

Google Alerts is apparently working with Pubsubhubbub as well. When you create a new google alert you can choose the “as it happens” option which is apparently using this protocol to give you real-time results. Again don’t forget to read my article titled 10 Things You Need To Know About RSS Cloud to get a better idea of the significance behind all this! You can also utilize this service by installing the Pubsubhubbub plugin for your Wordpress self-hosted blog.

Putting Pubsubhubbub To The Test

Literally immediately after I posted this article, I started my stopwatch to see how long it would take for my new post to show up inside Google Reader. Total time was 1 minute 49 seconds. Not bad!