After watching TWIg (This Week in Google) Episode 1 about a week ago found out about Pubsubhubsub. It sounded interesting because it seems like this protocol or something like it is going to be important to Google Wave in the future. I have not had a chance to play with Google Wave yet, but from what I saw its goal is to do everything in real time, including interactions with websites, blogs, forums and comments.
With the current polling syndication system this is impossible to do without polling every website you are interested in multiple times a second. Pubsubhubsub is building on the current syndication spec and adding push notifications to it, thus allowing real time updates from any enabled site with a syndicated feed. In this post I am going to go over a little more of what I have learnt about PSHS and what it does and how to enable it with WordPress.
I was just listening to This Week in Google episode two and they were discussing PubSubHubBub which is a Google Code project implementing push notifications on the web. The basic idea is that instead of having multiple clients poll your website feeds for new posts you site will push the content out immediately when you post it. So for example if I have this enable on my site when I hit the publish button my post is stored on the server, and simultaneously a ping is sent to Pubsubhubbub (terrible name fyi) with the new content. That is then pushed to anyone who is subscribed to the feed.
With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.
When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.
So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.
