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

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.

One of my friends pointed out to the recent news from OneRiot, saying that their business is gaining ground and that they are becoming a big player in real-time search market, here is the original news on TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/oneriots-new-realtime-search-api-served-up-with-a-side-of-revenue/

Here are some thoughts on this story:

It may seem strange to some people but I do not see any momentum on the OneRiot side, 97% of their search (momentum) coming from API, and here is the problem: free API search alone is not a good indication of a healthy business model, OneRiot is making high volume free API search calls as the last resort because:

• Consumers don't see much value to their search comparing to Twitter search results.
  

• OneRiot traffic for the past 6 months is downward, despite a good coverage by TechCrunch and venture funding.

• Lack of innovation, sticking to very limited sources, I am assuming 90% are Tweets, 8% are Diggs, 2% other posts, no real-time protocols available for Twitter and many more...
  

• Businesses use free API when they see lack of consumer demand for their product in an attempt to win some traffic and some market share. OneRiot lack of consumer demand shows that they are basically an unsuccessful business model using the last shot in an attempt to make their product appealing to some market leaders. A successful business first creates a unique and competitive product, builds solid consumer demand on top of it and as the demand goes up and to address the exponential growth creates the API for the partners not VISE VERSA.
  

OneRiot is mostly a duplicate work of Twitter trying to pretend a large/important real-time player ready to be bought. Frankly, I do not see OneRiot (as its current state) to be a real-time search engine. Their real-time search functionality is Twitter based without any chance to expose recent developments in real-time search technology simply because Twitter doesn't support PubSubHubBub or rssCloud protocols. Despite all that RSSMicro is a working example of recent developments in real-time search first introduced by Google and other marker leaders using PubSubHubBub and rssCloud, RSSMicro opens completely new possibilities to a decentralized real-time search, showcasing relevancy and accuracy of the search results by using its proprietary FeedRank algorithm.


Cheers!

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!