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WordPress Enters Real-Time: 7.5 Million Blogs Reach Twitter Speed
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, helps you stream all of your news and blog sources into an easy-to-manage RSS reader such as Google Reader. Millions of people use RSS to keep up with Mashable, The New York Times, and even LOLcats.
However, it does have its limitations. The big one is speed. It can take minutes to hours for a blog post to reach the reader through RSS. This has been a big reason why more and more people are turning to real-time services like Twitter and FriendFeed for their news. In the real-time web, delayed news and information just isn’t good enough.
Now WordPress has done something big that eliminates that RSS delay problem and brings Wordpress.com’s 7.5 million blogs into real-time, along with any other self-hosted Wordpress blog. It has implemented RSSCloud, an RSS element that makes instant syndication of blog posts possible. However, it does have a few obstacles to overcome before your RSS is just like Twitter.
RSSCloud and WordPress.com
Wordpress founder Matt Mullengweg explained the blog network’s newfound support for RSSCloud in a blog post earlier today. Essentially, while most RSS readers only periodically check servers for updates, RSSCloud makes checking for updates instantaneous. The result is that instead of waiting 15 minutes for your blog post to be syndicated, it will happen instantaneously:
Right now how most people interact with feeds is by checking that it updated every now and then, usually about once an hour. Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails? (The world would probably be more productive.) RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say “Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.”
While RSSCloud has been around for a while, Wordpress’s support of the element is nothing short of monumental. As ReadWriteWeb explains, RSSCloud is now active on every blog hosted on Wordpress.com, which numbers around 7.5 million and growing. There’s also an RSSCloud Wordpress plugin for self-...
