I have been advocate controlling ones own feed for many years. In fact I was often criticized for being a vocal opponent to FeedBurner. The hammer has fallen again for those that rely on FeedBurner, as most of us know FeedBurner is very slow to update data from your master feed additionally they have been known to strip items from feeds before so it will be curious to see if FeedBurner users will be able to use the Cloud tag at all.
Here is where FeedBurner users are going to get bent over when it comes to this new way of instant notification to those subscribers that opt in for instant notification of your blog updates.
Example: Lets say you post a blog post on a UFO landing on your yard. In order to get the scoop of the century you rush to post the encounter on your blog. Once you hit publish it may take a considerable amount of time for FeedBurner to re-cache your feed. Meanwhile if I live next door, and control my own RSS feed like I do now the moment I hit publish my RSS feed updates my subscribers get instantly notified and I essentially beat you to the scoop of the century.
Well with the introduction today of RSS Cloud for WordPress those that control their own feeds will now be able to push information to sites and services that implement the RSS Cloud features.
Matt over at WordPress has this to say about the new feature: “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.””
Feedburner users are going to have a little time to bang on the folks at FeedBurner to get this implemented as there is only one Feed Reading service that supports this today and that is River2 by none other Dave Winer. You can be 100% assured that in a very short period we will see more feed reader services, and a whole cottage industry pop up over instant notification of blog post on those blogs you follow the most.
The best thing this is through existing RSS tags and we will not be beholden to the folks at pubsubhubbub which I never fully agreed with their implementation anyway. This opens a world of possibilities and will be a very big deal!
This is as big as Twitter, mark my words! If enough sites implement this, then the so called blogging erosion will cease because in my opinion it is always better to build your brand then someone elses and to date my blog has not received a lot of Google Juice from post I have put on Twitter, sure I get great traffic from my Twitter followers but I would rather to continue to build my brand here versus someone elses.
