Something geeky that happened In Berkeley
I don’t usually blog about the development work that I do, but today something notable happened that’s worth making an exception for.
Mid-day I checked my email and a message was waiting from Matt Mullenweg, the founder and chief guy at Automattic, the company that makes Wordpress, software that powers millions of blogs, including InBerkeley.
His team had been working with a format and protocol that I had designed many years ago as part of RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. A few weeks ago at a lunch in San Francisco, he told me that they planned to ship it around this time. His message today said they were ready to go.
So Lance installed the new rssCloud plug-in here on InBerkeley, probably the first site outside of Matt’s company to do so. I tested it from the server in the media room in my North Berkeley house. We found a few problems and debugged them and got his software working with my software, the new River2 aggregator. They were ready to announce it.
A few minutes ago Lance installed the revised software here, and now with this post I’m going to find out if it works. If it does, my server will find out about this new post within seconds of its posting here. Wish us luck!
Sure enough! It worked. Happy. 
It was so fast that it was there before I could refresh the page. This is the benchmark for “realtime web” performance.
Where does this lead? Well, the plan is to have a loosely coupled 140-character message network. In other words, a communication system, like Twitter, but without a company at the center of it. Kind of like the Internet itself.
You should be able to use any software to communicate with any other software, choice everywhere. So you could just as easily use wordpress.com, or as we do at InBerkeley, a hosted server, or in my case an old Mac laptop in my Berkeley den. It all should work seamlessly as one distributed network, and that’s just what happened today.
Today this vision took a huge step forward. Exciting stuff!!
PS: We’re having an rssCloud meetup on Wednesday night at UC-Berkeley.
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This is very exciting, it will be very interesting how this will impact other development projects. Thanks for your work and posting this.
Cool!
This sounds very cool. Hardly groundbreaking, as the technology has been around to do this for years, as well the idea since 2001 it seems, from the original RSS spec. But with Wordpress officially supporting it on their hosted blogs, as well as the self-hosted Wordpress.org software, this may really take off.
My main question is, will this scale? I haven’t looked into how the Wordpress plugin for self-hosted blogs works exactly, but if say, I have 1000 subscribers to my blog, when I write a new post, will I be basically pinging possibly 1000 different IP addresses if they all had requested real-time/rssCloud updates.
I see that the scalability issue does not necessarily rest at the blog site, but with the cloud server. However, for many people the cloud server may be the same as the blog’s.
I suppose that 1000 incoming requests for a traditional pull of an RSS feed would be just as taxing on the network and hardware as 1000 outgoing requests, so perhaps there is no increased scaling issue for the blog server with supporting a push mechanism like this.
I use Wordpress and Twitter, and I heart RSS. I’m totally intrigued by some kind of cloud-based combination. Not a developer, so I’ll stay away from the rssCloud meetup, but please post anything interesting that happens there!