FeedRank role in real-time search
It has been over 3 years since RSSMicro started to analyze the content published on RSS feeds, our primary goal was to identify top publishers and measure the quality of the content as well as their update frequency. The significance of working with RSS or Atom feeds is the access to the most fresh content on the web with some acceptable latency. Today the same concept is being adopted by Google and others to distribute real-time data on the web using RSS and Atom feeds available on content publishers.

RSSMicro quickly took advantage of PubSubHubBub and rssCloud protocols and merged the existing ranking system it developed over the years known as FeedRank with real-time data by implementing these two real-time protocols on millions of RSS and Atom feeds already in its index. The result was significant and promising, for the first time RSSMicro achieved a high level of relevancy on real-time data published on RSS feeds.

FeedRank which is the RSSMicro technology behind ranking RSS and Atom feeds is now taking real-time data to a new level offering a solution to the noisy and irrelevant content published in real-time.

Twitter and Real-Time Protocols
Twitter is known as the leader of the real-time search, it has real-time distribution deals with Google and Microsoft. So many other companies like OneRiot basically follow Twitter to create their own real-time search engines. Unlike others RSSMicro offers a global solution which does not only rely on one or two sources and instead follows the recent developments in real-time technologies and solutions first offered by Google. RSSMicro offers relevant and rich content along images and videos as they are being published in real-time. Currently identified many Twitter and FriendFeeds accounts, news publishers, blogs and many other sources on millions of RSS feeds which have been closely monitored over the years. In theory, any system which relies on real-time protocols should surpass Twitter in volume and FeedRank will be able to help to add relevancy and accuracy to the equation. The trend in which people implement these protocols is going up as we see this on WordPress and some other blog platforms and here we need to scale up the FeedRank processes so that we can follow the growth we anticipate in the near future.

Twitter: Real-Time Content vs Public Opinion
As we see the growing trend in using real-time data distribution technologies by many news publishers, blog platforms and businesses, one question remains unanswered and that is what would be the role of Twitter in maybe 2 or 3 years from now?

Twitter is a 140 characters messaging service which has limitation in posting images, videos, HTML content and more, it seems likely that if people stay loyal and use Twitter and enjoy tweeting about their status and some other stories that find interesting, Twitter will become the source of public opinions and trends on the web rather than real-time content unless it takes a sharp turn and re-defines its messaging and posting service and creates a full-featured content publishing tool, at that point it would be more like another blog or messaging platform that compete with other tools already available on the market. However the role of being the source of public opinions and trends will remain the greatest asset of Twitter as millions of loyal users tweet on regular basis about current events and stories.

Find featured RSS feeds on RSSMicro here:
http://www.rssmicro.com/featured_rss_feeds.web

FeedRank on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/FeedRank

About FeedRank:
http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank.web


FeedRank Team.

All RSSMicro internal feeds are PubSubHubBub enabled, subscribers can take advantage of RSSMicro hub and receive RSSMicro feed updates in real-time. Checking the server logs we have noticed a relatively new PubSubHubBub subscription service started at https://pshb-service.appspot.com/ we couldn't find any information on the web regarding the nature or the source of this new service, however we have all the reasons to believe that this is in fact Google subscription service to PubSubHubBub enabled feeds. The service has implemented HTTPS protocol using Hub.secret parameter for secure server to server connection.

RSSMicro hub has been able to verify all the secure subscription requests coming from the source and pushing content to the subscriber's address above.

I will update this post once I find more information about this particular subscriber.

Google announced a new feature on Google Reader, this time website owners without a feed can use Google to generate a feed for their sites. They can add the feed to the site and let users enjoy updates by subscribing to the feed. This work can be done in a couple of minutes.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html

It is important to note that the significance of this work is not the reader ability to notify you with the site updates but is the ability to create a feed using Google infrastructure. The feed can be added to the site and being updated outside of Google reader. You can see a sample Google generated feed for a site without a feed here:

http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/1451785850960242912

This would expand FeedRank to potentially all content on the web. More and more content would be FeedRank enabled as feed become the standard mechanism for distributing site updates on the web. In other words, if someone wants to deal with updates on the web they better use a feed. This has a huge impact on the web as we know it.

For real-time search players this could also be a turning point, feed will have the most recent updates on any website and it is the best candidate for real-time search engines, there is no better mechanism that can support real-time data distribution while keeping the decentralized nature of the web.
 
This means more work for us to do here in RSSMicro, and if RSSMicro can show how FeedRank works on 4 Million feeds, it sure can do it for 400 Million feeds and more.


Cheers!

Today RSSMicro completes the integration of rssCloud and PubSubHubBub two real-time data distribution protocols into its proprietary ranking system for RSS and Atom feeds.

RSSMicro is the leading RSS feed search engine, since 2006 it has been working on RSS feed discovery as well as ranking and indexing millions of feeds in its database using FeedRank algorithm. Today by integrating two leading real-time data distribution protocols it has achieved a milestone in indexing relevant information in real-time. RSSMicro API partners as well as individuals can enjoy relevant articles, images and videos in real-time. For API information contact RSSMicro at info[at]rssmicro.com

Follow real-time news on Obama here:
http://www.rssmicro.com/search/Obama

Follow RSSMicro on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/RSSMicro

Came across this article:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cliqset_activity_streams_api.php

Here are some thoughts:

ActivityStream extension to RSS and Atom format (mistakenly referred to as a format in the article) and the notion behind standardizing or normalizing "activities" is a good idea however there are two important things to think about:
 
1- How much interest is there for every single activity on social networks? people sometimes show little interest in the post itself yet how they might be interested in a feed entry for adding an image, a feed entry for changing background color, a feed entry probably for adding new friend. The real-time search is already saturated with content that adding all these data to the stream doesn't make sense, at least for now. These type of activities can be used for some customized end user applications that serve a special purpose not real-time search to my view. I can think of a celebrity that is also active across multiple social networks (which is very rare), and people want to know every single activity from him or her in real-time (still very rare).
 
2- Data formats have already been standardized, that was their point in the article (super highway coast to coast), the standard format is Atom or RSS. Other data can be attached as an extension (a new namespace) to these two formats to make it richer. This has been happening since the creation of RSS and Atom. What Cliqset is doing is a repetitive action by duplicating feeds that already carry ActivityStream extension in their feeds (if there is any). Those social networks who have such API for activities and willing to make it public already have ActivityStream attached to their feeds, not sure what the purpose of Cliqset is in here and what value it brings to the table.
 
 
Bottom line, some of these ideas come from lack of understanding of the existing technologies, maybe it is just the author.

Now the question is which format is more capable to adopt new extensions, to my view it is the RSS that is even richer than Atom, RSS feeds can add Atom namespace and use its elements while Atom feeds can't use RSS elements as a namespace because RSS deosn't have a namespace.