JaypeeOnline

What is PubSubHubbub? I first heard about it when Joseph Scott mentioned it while talking about “InterPress” at WordCamp Las Vegas last year. I was chatting with a blogger friend a couple weeks back when he mentioned how my latest blog posts were quickly picked up by Google Alerts. I told him that I was using PubSubHubbub on my blog via the PubSubHubbub WordPress plugin.

So what is PubSubHubbub? I’m sure some of you are also asking this question. When my friend asked me about it, I realized that many people even bloggers still don’t know about PubSubHubbub. So I decided to gather some resources and write this post to share what PubSubHubbub is and how it works.

According to Wikipedia:

PubSubHubbub is an open protocol for distributed Publish/subscribe communication on the internet. The protocol extends the Atom and RSS protocols for data feeds. The main purpose is to provide near-instant notifications of change updates, which would improve on the typical situation where a client periodically polls the feed server at some arbitrary interval.

Now that we have a definition and a slight idea on what PubSubHubbub is, let’s go next with a YouTube video created by Google Developers to help further explain PubSubHubbub.

If you’re still having a hard time grasping the idea and couldn’t get the concept of PubSubHubbub and how it works, here’s another resource material that might help.

So now, do you understand what PubSubHubbub is and how it works? If you do, great! If not, its okay. Don’t be hard on yourself. Try to go through the video and slideshow again and see if that will help. You can also visit the official PubSubHubbub page where you can find other resources and links that can help you better understand what PubSubHubbub is.

You can also read this post – “Google’s PubSubHubbub” from the pioneer of RSS himself, Dave Winer.

Anyone else using PubSubHubbub on their blogs? What other uses aside from blog updates do you think PubSubHubbub can be useful?