I’ve never had much issue with RSS, but some people say it was a dying format. Unlike the “real time web” of Twitter, Facebook and other services, the data from RSS wasn’t getting polled often enough to be useful. Heaven forbid you get the latest blog posts from someone half a day from now.
I understand that in the world of news, even an hour delay can kill the freshness of a story, and so it isn’t surprising that there are companies trying to create formats that will allow RSS to notify RSS readers of new stories faster than ever before.
One of those formats is RSS Cloud and it got a huge publicity boost recently with the backing of WordPress.
From the WordPress.com Blog:
Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated.
Why is this important? Right now how most people interact with feeds is by checking that it updated every now and then, usually about once an hour. Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails? (The world would probably be more productive.) RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say “Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.”
While there is only one RSS reader that currently supports this “push” feature, I have a feeling that many others will support it soon. There is also a WordPress.org plugin to activate this feature on your blog, and if you run a news focused site, this might be exactly what you’ve been hoping for.
For the rest of us, is instant RSS really that important? Let me know in the comments below.