Google Reader Gets PubSubHubbub for Shared Items

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 06 Aug 2009

One of the driving forces at Google is speed: you need to be able to find what you are looking for easily and in a speedy manner. This goes double for the company’s web browser, Google Chrome – the latest Beta version of which comes with a 30% speed increase and a few other enhancements. But it is also true in the case of Google Reader, the company’s RSS feeds aggregator.

The Google Reader team says that it wants to make the consumption of feeds an efficient process. The Google Reader user must be able to quickly and easily interact with Reader data on the rest of the web – that is why the team is announcing that Google Reader has started to use the PubSubHubbub protocol to send real-time updates to FriendFeed.

“We're happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there's a <link rel="hub" .../> element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time,” explained Google Reader Frontend Tech Lead, Mihai Parparita.

FriendFeed, Parparita added, is already taking advantage of this pinging. FriendFeed users that have added their Google Reader shared items to their FriendFeed account will notice that items shared in Google Reader will immediately show up on FriendFeed. The whole thing will happen in a matter of seconds – just click the share button and in seconds the shared item will show up on FriendFeed.

Additional details on the PubSubHubbub protocol are available on the project’s site here.
You can get started with Google Reader here.
You can get stared with FriendFeed here.


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