Last month some important news came out which were related to feeds, real-time web publishing and indexing. The first news was about a controversial patent that was awarded to Facebook for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. The patent is huge for many reasons, but most importantly signifies the role of feed as the preferred publishing method on social networks and once again shows how feed is turning into the very fabrics of the web and how businesses are rushing to have more footprints on this very fabric.

In terms of real-time data distribution, PubSubHubBub protocol is now more streamlined with Wordpress and Google itself and more likely others will join this frenzy by implementing PSHB hubs. It seems likely that this trend will change the web and how we publish and consume the data, and as far as apps running on the web, feed will play an increasingly important role for us.

And finally it seems likely that publishers, subscribers, apps, search engines will work more off of RSS and Atom feeds rather than HTML pages and our mission is more demanding and critical at the time while providing a mechanism for ranking RSS and Atom feeds.


Links:

Facebook News Feed Patent:
http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/02/facebook-feed-patent/

Wordpress PubSubHubBub Support:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

Google Real-Time Indexing:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_developing_real_time_index.php