Google Reader turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally killed it. For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates. Sure, it got a bit of a facelift in 2011, but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t… → Read More
You may recall that back in the summer of 2009, there was a lot of hubbub over a Google 20 percent project with a near impossible name: Pubsubhubbub. Creators Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin actually unveiled it at our Realtime Stream CrunchUp back then. And it garnered a lot of buzz for a good reason: it aimed to speed up traditionally slow feeds of information to realtime. Well, now the two… → Read More
All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published.
PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting… → Read More
Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the… → Read More
Editor’s note: With all of the debate lately between RSSCloud versus PubSubHubbub, we wanted to hear from a developer who could actually tell us which one might be better and why. The following guest post is written by Josh Fraser, the co-founder of EventVue, who is an active contributor to PubSubHubbub in his free time. He has contributed several client libraries for PubSubHubbub including a… → Read More
We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.
Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs… → Read More
When PubSubHubbub launched at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, pretty much everyone in the audience immediately recognized it as a very cool thing. Basically, it takes any feed and significantly speeds up the time it takes to be found by various sources using new hubs that specifically gather that information. But the biggest fan of it may be the company that employs the two who… → Read More
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was demoed was PubSubHubbub, a new protocol made by a few Googlers in their spare time to improve the speed at which Atom and RSS items travel around the web. As expected, they have a big player on their side now: Google Reader.
The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub… → Read More
As we’ve noted for some time, Google Reader’s social features leave a lot to be desired. The search giant is slowly moving in the right direction towards making shared items more accessible between friends, but it’s still rather clunky. Today, the functionality receives yet another upgrade, including one that may finally spur social usage — “liking” items.
Beginning today, you can search for… → Read More
I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
