Today a revolution occurred both in the way millions of web users can receive news and news portals and bloggers can push information out to followers and the web. Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud feed makes the information exchange happen in realtime. Today WordPress enabled all of its blogs with the technology.
With the installation of a simple plugin available in your WordPress control panel, your blog can now push content out to the cloud and individual users as fast as you can click, “Post.” In fact, just as fast as Twitter messages go out. The technology used is the same simple RSS used by popular feed aggregators like googlereader, netnewswire and other over the web and computer-resident applications that gather news you’ve subscribed to receive through RSS feeds.
What has changed at this moment from old-style RSS feed mechanics are two elements:
- The speed at which that content can be delivered to you, and
- the fact that anyone now has the ability to push out posts at the speed of Twitter to followers without using Twitter. This technology is platform and company agnostic.
Wow, revolutionary.
Now, you can read feeds in real time – Twitter fast
There’s another side to this – you can use River2 software right now to read RSS feeds in realtime. The procedure for installing the software that makes it possible to do this is still not very user friendly for non-geeks, and you’ll be reading feeds you subscribe to on the web at River2’s site – there aren’t any out of the box client side applications developed yet.
It seems pretty clear judging from the widespread interest this development has sparked overnight, though, that many major news aggregation platforms will be eagerly jumping on board to incorporate this revolution into their own applications really soon. After all, WordPress has made a huge initial commitment to Dave’s newest technology and in doing so put RSS cloud feeds squarely on the map. We can probably expect several brilliant desktop apps to release cloud feed enabled versions, very shortly. I’m so looking forward to that.
INTERVIEW EXCERPTS
Here are excerpts from Dave Winer’s interview today with Jay Rosen about what this change is going to mean to internet users, along with some (clarifying) notes of my own.
What the RSS Cloud feed technology is
Dave: RSS Cloud is a bit of technology – wires that connect up differently to the software, it’s like plumbing. I got an email from Matt, they make WordPress, and he wanted to meet for lunch. I expected I would be pitching him on supporting RSS Cloud but he said, “No, we’ve already decided on doing that.” What this means is all of the blogs hosted on WordPress.com have this capability now. And any (privately hosted) WordPress blog. This means all the blogs are real time (enabled).
It’s all part of what we call bootstrap (step by step advancement). A week ago 1100 used RSS Cloud feeds and now millions (are able to) use it. It supports RSS cloud on the aggregation side, like Googlereader, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Gets the updates within a second. A feedreader can take up to an hour to get an update – feedreaders can only check (for new content) so often. But, this is like Twitter. It’s real time. I (checked for) a test post (right after it was made) and sure enough, there it was.
One of our developers, Jeremy Fuld, found out that CNN political wire is using RSS Cloud feed now. I subscribed to it and it worked. Now I’m getting news (instantly).
Used to be, you had RSS (with) no company in the middle and it was slow, or it could be fast but then there was a company in the middle. (RSS Cloud feed) gives you news fast with no company in the middle.
Jay: If I want to monitor lots of blogs and news sites, as a reader who wants to keep up with the news, (this is really important for me).
Dave: Are you using a cloud-aware reader? There will be others but right now there’s only River2.
Jay: Because it’s faster, that changes blogging how?
Dave: Makes it like Twitter.
How is it going to change the web experience
To get it to look and behave like Twitter, (look at) clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic – instead of publishing Twitter (with these tools) you publish one of these feeds. (RSS Cloud feeds are) like Twitter, not different. Well, there is a big difference: there’s no fail whale in RSS. (There’s also no company in the middle between the reader and the content.)
Jay: I can get what I get in my twitter feed and not have to go through Twitter or any other company. And, not have to go through Twitter who now (tracks the links in my Twitter stream that I click on).
(Now we can) implement something like Twitter with just the internet. Don’t need more than the internet to do it. It’s OK to use a company at first to get something going.
(Until now, new services have been) held back because Twitter can’t (move fast enough to implement them). It’s inevitable that (the Twitter-style communication mechanism) get decentralized and that’s what happening here. Today might be the actual day that we look back on and say, “This was the turning point.” We won’t know for sure until later but it sure feels that way right now.
Jay: Doesn’t it all depend on users starting to pick up these tools – like River2? Just like with GoogleReader implementation.
Dave: Before GoogleReader there were two tools: myuserland.com and mynetscape.com were (early) news aggregators. I think Googlereader has to (implement RSS Cloud feed technology), by the way. “Has to” might be too strong a (phrase) for it. But I think they will.
Jay: Here’s how I would use it. I would love to assemble my own list of sources that I know I rely on to I send out information through my Twitter feed . . . a news source alert system. I would put readwriteweb in there, everything James Fallows writes, certain sections of the New York Times, Scripting News. I would keep it to smaller news sources that are likely to contain news that I want to distribute to the 25,000 people that now follow me on Twitter. It would be incredible useful to me because I don’t always remember to check what James Fallows has put up on his Atlantic blog. To have a hand built record of news flow . . . would be great.
What are the feeds going to look like?
Jay: So tell me, how much do I get on an update from RSS cloud . . . a synopsis or 140 characters?
Dave: I give you the first 500 characters. In the case of the New York Times, 500 characters of their synopsis – which is pretty much the entire synopsis. I don’t write a news reader. I write a news skimmer because that reflects the way I subscribe to a huge number of sources. My brain is very good at skimming. People feel they have to read everything on a page but that’s not true. The human brain is capable of recognizing patterns in a lot less time than you that it is . . . if you try it.
I strip out all the html (of a post) and I truncate it at 500 characters and it works, it really works. I fully intend to make it a setting to play with so people can set (their feed) at 700 characters or whatever, but so far noone has asked for it. We’re going to give you a share button in River2.
Freedom to learn and grow
Jay: Yeah, Twitter is much slower . . . to get replies, incoming stream. Links I click on have to go to Twitter first before they go to my destination page.
Dave: Yeah, they want to create some metrics. Want to know which links you click on and tabulate that information. Google does that too – you can see on the bottom, connecting to Google. (That’s when they’re tracking your clicks.)
The wingnuts say I don’t want the government in health care. (What you really don’t want is) you don’t want all these companies involved in your free expression. We’re doing another corner turn and bringing the internet back into things. I think it’s bad that Twitter’s doing this but it’s good because it’s a teachable moment. (People can learn that we can do real-time and short message communication using just native internet technology and freely available tools, without any intermediary company involved in making this level of communication possible).
Jay: When you own your own you realize what freedom is.
Dave: Tradition is not a business model. More is more, there’s no such thing as too much information.
readwriteweb.com’s Marshall Kirkpatrick says
Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences. The list of possible technical developments on top of RSSCloud could be as open-ended as the developments enabled by the core of RSS.