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rssCloud Begins Heading East

Dec 29, 2009 | 1 Comment |

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By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Above the skies of Berkley, California the rssCloud began amassing and is now blowing Eastward.

Today, Dave Winer gave access to those interested in testing what he calls, “the last major piece,” piece of the rssCloud system. This puffy piece is called the Cloud Pipe.

It’s designed to maintain the stream of real-time feed updates for desktop and mobile apps. It’s the foundation component that I was talking about yesterday for the “immediacy movement.”

This is big news.

Winer has put into place the necessary architecture for developers to begin accessing the massive amount of content that is in RSS format in real-time.

In its current state, he has opened up for limited testing. But what important testing it is. Right now, he is the only person publicly challenging Google’s PuSH, a.k.a – PubSubHubBub.

A system like his that exists outside the corporate structure has the potential to be more beneficial to the developer and startup communities as a whole. Simply because he doesn’t need to retrofit it to any other products that the company offers. It is only Eastward ho on the wind.

As part of the RSS .92 spec in 2001 the cloud element was introduced. One of the reasons that RSS has continued to grow and outperformed other specs was the clarity around its inception – keep it simple. Elements are robust and offloaded to the software that reads them to understand how to process them.

The enclosure element that powers podcasting is the perfect example of this. It is up to the aggregator to decide how to handle the enclosure. All the publisher had to do was add it to the feed. The cloud element is the same.

Anyone running a cloud simply intakes the feed and then runs it through the system. Anyone running software that supports the rssCloud is updated right then and there. Nothing extra needed to be added to the feed.

The cloud element now the most important element to take RSS to new places over the next decade. My recommendation would be to keep on eye on this cloud as it continues to come together.