Real-time web protocol PubSubHubbub’s co-creator Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters today about how the new information delivery system works and how Facebook can support it.
He’s published his deck on his blog and we’ve embedded it below as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day. If you’re interested in making your content available in real time or more efficiently using real-time content syndicated from elsewhere, this presentation is a must-see.
Each day leading up to the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th we’re highlighting one important article written by someone from outside our staff on the topic of the real-time web. Slatkin’s 61-slide deck makes a great introduction to both the technical and strategic aspects of the PubSubHubbub protocol.
Slatkin starts out by explaining the value propositions of real-time data delivery, with an emphasis on social networking because he’s speaking at Facebook. He then goes on to discuss how PubSubHubbub works and how to implement it. He also spends several slides discussing what he considers the technical shortcomings of other real-time protocols, particularly RSSCloud, but that’s only a small part of the talk.
Slatkin will be participating in the Real-Time Web Summit next month. (“Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks,” he said last week “See ya there!”) He’s got a very big vision of where all this is going to go; he’s thinking of things like distribution of financial information and data from sensor networks in the physical world. This isn’t just about social networking, and it certainly isn’t just about Twitter, though that’s what most people tend to think of when they hear the phrase real-time web. There’s a whole lot more to it than that, as you can see from the list of questions some of our event participants have already said they want to discuss.
Here’s what Slatkin has to say, a few of our favorite early slides are excerpted above the embedded slideshow in order to convince our subscribers to click through to the site and read the presentation.
What is PubSubHubbub?
Some of the Benefits
It’s hard to explain “flow,” of course – you know it when you see it. Others in the industry have described increased time-on-site for website visitors, or a more human and people-centric experience of the web.
The list of possibilities is endless and Slatkin encourages developers to “scale up to new use cases” – meaning that building real-time to scale will enable new activities that we can’t imagine yet.
On Decentralization and Design
Those are just a few of our favorite slides, below is the whole presentation embedded. Please check it out and consider joining us at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit to discuss this and other real-time technologies and their implications.
