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.

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rssCloud Begins Heading East is a post from: TechStartups.com

The buzz around real-time RSS feeds has died down a bit but don’t let that fool you into thinking it has gone away.

The foundation of the immediacy movement are these real-time feeds and the quiet that is growing around them is because developers are now changing the way that applications interact with them.

There are two issues with real-time RSS feeds – getting content to the services like PuSH or rssCloud and the applications that read from the fire hose them.

So before we can worry about developers, let’s talk about getting your data to these fire hose services.

The commons wisdom for over a decade has been that moving your syndicated content around the webs should be done with XML-RPC. It has worked great as a backend technology for zipping blog posts back and forth between ping services and blogs.

But now as the desire to have instant access to something once it is posted XML-RPC and RSS have been getting usurped by other technologies like XMPP. These are always on, always listening type of technologies that communicate between servers and applications. RSS and XML-RPC were not designed that way.

As things have been getting patched together and developers look for options to use the abundance of RSS feeds interesting solutions are coming to light. One of them is an elegant solution that addresses the first step of making real-time feeds viable – POST.

Technologist, Russell Beattie, has put this one out there . . . and it just makes sense. He put together a PHP and cURL script that meets the requirements of an XML-RPC ping to a service. In his case he figured out how to make it work with Feedburner and his blogging platform. Getting data to services should be this simple by default.

Notifications that are this simple, without the cumbersome protocols, would speed development and encourage innovation as developers wouldn’t need to spend so much time in the weeds. On your behlaf and mine, I’d like to say that if Superfeedr and rssCloud were to accept this as part of their spec it would be much easier to take the first step.

Thanks to Russel for his post. (heh)

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Real-time Feeds: 1st Step – Getting Your Data There is a post from: TechStartups.com

Real-time feedsters, Superfeedr, are setting the stage for what could be the brand name of this real-time feed movement. Efficiency is the mother of brand building online. And their service is efficient.

With a release of a new feed discovery API they’re giving access to their network to more developers. It’s a reason other than the core of their business, real-time feed access, to think of them as a provider of value.

Which is awesome if you like catching information like its Mardi Gras beads without showing off your man ta tas.

Superfeedr is now making it less of a coding headache to grab the auto-discovery feeds that are associated with the sites that you enjoy the most. It is a simply utility API that takes the hassle of accessing publisher content.

It’s not a breakthrough at all. But what they are offering with this little hook is an opportunity for developers to begin working with their platform in low threshold way. A simple GET request to Superfeedr with a site URL and they send you back the URI info for the feeds associated with that page. Simple.

When I say, “own it” in the title and “brand name” in the first sentence of this post I mean they are positioning themselves to be synonymous with real-time feeds and data transfer. If there is one thing that we like it is the ability to categorize a movement or technology. And if we can label it, put name and face with it, we’re even more content.

Superfeedr will be to PubSubHubBub (PuSH) and rssCloud what FeedBurner was to RSS. No one wants to cozy up to such a nerdy proposition as a relationship with ugly tech like PuSH or rssCloud. FeedBurner didn’t hold rights to RSS but they surely became synonymous with the technology and owned the public mind when it came to thinking about feeds. They owned it to the tune of $100 million on exit.

If Superfeedr has similar talent or ambition in house to FeedBurner’s the opportunity to fill the void left by them years ago is up for the taking. This new meme breathing life into RSS is ripe for a company positioned in the transfer of web content and data normalization to put their stamp on the industry. A few strategic partnerships that catch the communities eye and they could own this space.

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Superfeedr Preparing To Own It is a post from: TechStartups.com

Lazyfeed, the community style feed reader that recommends content to users based on topics, got an update this week. Maybe, I should say an overhaul.

The main site changed drastically to accomodate the integration of multiple real-time updates. This goes without saying that there was an equally drastic change to the codebase that powers the service.

What are my initial impressions of the new look?

Lazyfeed is trying to solve a major issue, one that I discussed last night, in regards to filtering the web. There is so much content zipping place to place that some of the best of it misses us. Not for the lack of trying but for not being in the right place at the right time.

This service is trying to solve that by allowing users to choose the topics they are interested in bubbling them up in real-time updates. They are attempting to bring real-time discovery across an entire set of interests all at the same time.

How do they manage this? First, the new interface is comprised of blocks that represent the interests a user has entered – say, apple tv or Sarah Palin, then multiply by 5 or so and you have the idea. Each block then updates in real-time when a post is found that matches the criteria.

If it sounds complex, it really isn’t. What is complex is when it goes into operation. In attempting to solve a problem of overload the interface creates it for the new user. Lazyfeed likens their style of content delivery to conveyor belt sushi restaurants.

I’m sure I don’t need to say that it is quite overwhelming to be in front of this screen for the first time. It is like a series of synapses firing across the brain on all of your interests at near the same time. However, after giving it some time I realized that this was a new way of interacting with content that I was unfamiliar with and there was a learning curve.

Once I had this behind me I was ready to move on and allow Lazyfeed to algorithmically bring me my interests on the square platters they have designed. With enough topic and content added in it was less of an issue to have the interface rotating in front of my eyes out of my control.

To gain some control all you need to do is click on any of the boxes for a new modal window that displays a more traditional feed reader layout with all of the sources for a topic. There is also additional discovery of similar topics by tag. What I would love to see in this new display is the ability to search within a given top and set of sources.

Lazyfeed is getting there, as they say in the biz. With this new revision it is obvious that the team is thinking about big picture issues for users of their service and the interwebs at large. To be honest, I think there are a couple products that this release could be broken down into. Lazyfeed is good technology waiting for the right users and clients.

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Lazyfeed Update for Real-Time Discovery is a post from: TechStartups.com

You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn’t loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn’t accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn’t allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn’t added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she’s been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It’s like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, “Look, I got your twig. Happy now?”

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I’m gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI – 85% of web users don’t read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Reader Got Updates? Don’t Even Get Me Started is a post from: TechStartups.com