WordPress support PuSH

Enter PubSubHubbub (PuSH), an open protocol that is designed to get a feed to subscribers as fast as possible, in terms of seconds. The protocol has been gaining support and WordPress.com has just announced that it has enabled it for all 10.5 million blogs it hosts, a huge step forward for PuSH.

What it means is that feed subscribers to any of the blogs hosted by WordPress.com will get notified instantly when their favorite blogs post something new, if they use a feed reader that supports PuSH, like Google Reader, anyway. The new feature is already live, so WordPress.com users are already taking advantage of it. If you’re hosting your own blog using WordPress software, you can install the new PuSHPress plugin to get access to the same functionality.

PuSH is a real-time web protocol designed to completely revamp the way feeds get published. Until now, feed clients would ping a blog or a site every so often to see if there is anything new. This introduced a noticeable lag between the time an article would be published and the time it landed in people’s feed readers, sometimes even hours. PuSH changes things over. Both the publisher and the reader connect to a central hub. When a new piece is published, the hub is notified immediately. The hub server then notifies all the subscribers that there’s something new and the entire process usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds.