On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud ...

[brad]

Are you confused about the difference between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud?  You're not alone.

Here's how the confusion came about:

Dave Winer invented rssCloud way back in the day.  It only distributed lite pings, the callback endpoint was the IP address that you subscribed from, and nobody really ever implemented it, so you

Comments

RSS's cloud was in fact implemented

[anonymous]

Hi Brad -- Dave Winer here.

We implemented the cloud element in Radio and Manila, two leading blog platforms, in 2001 and 2002. So it's not true that no one implemented it. And it wasn't hiding, it was right there in the RSS 2.0 spec, which is a very widely implemented format.

Re: RSS's cloud was in fact implemented

[brad]

Sorry, I meant widely implemented. 2 implementations isn't very many.

Re: RSS's cloud was in fact implemented

[blasdelf]

Especially since support for it was removed!

Fusion

[anonymous]

Brad. Kudos for Pubsubhubbub: this is a key piece of technology. I hope that you and Dave can found a middle ground: the competition is not an alternative spec but the proprietary micro messaging platforms. May be the solution is to: get pubsubhubbub, make RSS a first class citizen, add a section explaining how it is an evolution of RSS Cloud) and even use the RSS cloud name (in my opinion pubsubhubbub is too complex of name for it to become mainstream).

Can we try to set up a time for you and Dave to sit down and discuss this?

-Edwin Khodabakchian (edwink@devhd.com, co-founder of feedly)

Re: Fusion

[anonymous]

Edwin: Could you elaborate on what you mean by first-class citizen? RSS is fully supported (0.92, 1.0, 2.0) by the reference implementation and documented here (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/RssFeeds).
-Brett

Re: Fusion

[erik]

Heh, this is starting to sound pretty epic. Like Israel and Palestine sitting down to talk peace negotiations.

Re: Fusion

[ydna]

Too complex a name? This is just the next step in Brad's effort to see how far he can push the naming insanity. We keep slurping up his technology that he spews out and the names just get weirder. What's in a name? The name means nothing.

I'm Glad PSHB has a Public Process

[ext_82458]

You're right to tout the benefits of how PubSubHubbub is being created.

As a member of the RSS Advisory Board, I can't stress enough how important it is for specs to be written as a public process. The RSSCloud Interface should not be controlled by one person, as I argue today on my blog:

http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3559

[kragen]

As usual, interacting with Dave Winer leads to no good. You should have known better than to try to engage with him. Best just to ignore him, stay far, far away, and don't let him get involved in anything you care about.

[anildash]

Kragen, fwiw, I've been interacting a lot with Dave lately, and a bit with Brad and Brett on this, to try and help explain the benefits of all this work to outsiders. Here's the real-world perspective: All three are on the side of the angels. They're doing good work, iterating in their own way, and are gonna get good results. And frankly, they've all been magnanimous and open to feedback, even though they're obvious coming at this from slightly divergent points of origin

[brad]

Yes!

An rssCloud <-> PSHB proxy would be trivial. I'm just happy we're making data realtime. The only sad part is that developers might be confused for awhile.

Dave Winer is the Kanye West of Tech

[kragen]

Let's be honest here and put what everyone knows to be true on the table. Dave Winer is a jerk. That's been amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions by Dave Winer himself. He is also a grumpy old narcissist who wants his name associated with everything. Any reasonable person looking at pubsub vs. RSS cloud would conclude that pubsub is a better solution - but Dave can't handle that so he's going to bitch his way into the spotlight. He "could have invented Twitter" - but he didn't, so he's bitter about that. RSS cloud "could have been big" - but it wasn't, so now he's bitter about that. What would truly be great is if everyone would just ignore Dave Winer and let RSS cloud go the way of several of his other dumb ideas that never went anywhere. (Flickrfan, anyone?) Dave Winer is the Kanye West of tech.

[mart]

This reminds me of the early days of OpenID when there were all the other random OpenID-like systems that did mostly the same thing but with different bits on the wire. I think just as with OpenID vs. TypeKey (for example) it won't be too hard to map between these things so that one can be implemented in terms of the other.

While we're on the subject of bridging things, it'd be neat to have a hubbub hub that can use weblogs.com-style pings as an optional second notification mechanism so that folks running software that already supports such pings don't need to install anything new to get started.

[ext_207224]

I already did this in July, but we haven't turned it on:

http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/source/browse/trunk/hub/main.py#1762

The issue is that XML-RPC pings only take the channel URL, so you have to parse HTML to rediscover the actual feed URLs, or maintain a relation of feeds to channel links (the latter is easier, actually).

Otherwise, I still think that light pinging is going to hinder everyone long-term. The performance characteristics are bad. I'm starting to expound on why here:

http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/ComparingProtocols

Feedback would be appreciated!