Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this morning that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. The service has implemented the Google-backed real-time protocol Pubsubhubbub, an Atom-centric alternative to the real-time protocol RSSCloud, which competitor WordPress turned on for millions of bloggers last week.
A fast-growing number of sites around the web are now flying the real-time banner, no longer requiring that news reading software poll them for updates several times an hour. With two of the largest blogging software providers now real-time, blogging could steal a little thunder back from immediacy-rich social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Josh Fraser, a Pubsubhubbub contributor, wrote a comparison of that protocol and RSSCloud on TechCrunch this weekend. Fraser favors Pubsubhubbub but says that both are a big win for the real-time web. Developer Chuck Shotton has written about the prospects of making the two protocols interoperable. “I know this sounds dorky,” RSSCloud lead developer Dave Winer said last night on Twitter, “but I don’t see rssCloud and Pubsubhubub competing. It’s not either-or.”
Note that the Typepad announcement says that Google Reader is consuming Pubsubhubbub feeds – but we’ve confirmed with protocol developer Brad Fitzpatrick and then with SixApart that this was a misunderstanding. Google Reader still does not consume real time feeds. When it does, that will be a big deal for the real time web.
