15.12.09

Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / December 14, 2009 1:25 PM / 11 Comments

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms.

Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days.

The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl. FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. It does, though, have more incentive to innovate and work in user's interests. Ultimately, the service you use to publish content updates to Twitter is just a small part of a much bigger story.

feedburnertwitter.jpg

The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won't be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time.

Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients, the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener, this afternoon's announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week's go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly.

WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability.

The next step? This morning Google's Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search, the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it.

Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location.

If that's the kind of platform that's coming - how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future.


Comments

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  1. This kind of inter-operation certainly does open up a whole new set of possibilities for the real-time web.

    Question: I can see the value of auto tweeting a link to a new blog post. Going the other way, though, seems less useful... if you want your tweets listed with your blog, you can do this using a widget. Or am I missing something here?... Can someone explain? (sorry if I'm being dense)

    Posted by: blog.3dbloke.com Author Profile Page

    | December 14, 2009 2:06 PM



  • Not clear on what you mean. You might want those tweets in a sidebar but saved in your archive, you might have a payload attached to them that gets displayed in full in longer-form medium. Lots of possibilities with two way communication.

     Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick Author Profile Page

    | December 14, 2009 2:43 PM



  • For the last few weeks I have been experimenting with WP.com, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr to see which site I want to use as my namespace - www.samsethi.me

    I like Posterous for a number of reasons - simplicity and its autoflow functions but the lack of themes and javascript support have frustrated me.

    I then tried Tumblr and it had everything I wanted from Posterous but I felt it had slowed down technically. Posterous were quick to support the new LinkedIn API changes and implement PubsubHubbub not so Tumblr.

    Thus in choosing my next blog platform my head told me Tumblr had a richer iPhone client, support for Javascript and hundreds of designed themes already but my gut told me that Posterous was going to be the nimbler platform as it was new and keen to catchup to Tumblr.

    To confuse matters more Wordpress.com started to announce new changes such as RSSCloud support, the Twitter API Pub/Sub support. Yet there no Javascript, limited plugin support etc.

    What I really want from my next blogging platform is support for the opensocial container, with Caja widget support, activitystreams/salmon etc. also the domain namespace would also be my openid endpoint. i.e www.samsethi.me

    So I am in the process of writing my first review blog post in 18 months about these new meso-blogging platforms (/via Dave Winer) that I have reviewed which can manage/archive the flow of my social objects to end points.

    For me the key in 2010 will be to own and control the flow of all my social objects and decide in which end point silo I wish to see them reside. Right now none of these platforms does everything I want but the first to properly support ActivityStreams will be top of my list.

    Of course if you do not need a personal namespace and customised theme then Cliqset might be the best option for managing your social objects flow.

     Posted by: Sam Author Profile Page | December 14, 2009 4:24 PM



  • Exactly. Google's real-time search works because they get pushed all updates from Twitter et al. The more they integrate these publish notifications, the more we'll see new content from all over the web being discoverable immediately. Next step for Google? They need an API for webmasters to push site updates when they make a change to their site: pushing updated XML Sitemaps to Google in addition to (or instead of) Google periodically traversing them.

     Posted by: Weston Ruter Author Profile Page

    | December 14, 2009 4:29 PM



  • Whoa whoa they're actually working on Feedburner? lol... this is good news. Nice they've built it in but it'd still be nice to use my Bit.ly API for my tracking... but I supposed they'll supply goo.gl link tracking???

    Posted by: Chuck Reynolds | December 14, 2009 4:36 PM



  • This looks to be some interesting news and looking forward to see how it will impact pushing out data to Twitter. Both Posterous and Tumblr auto-post to Twitter now, so is the advantage having a real time update to google search or just over-kill?

     Posted by: hootsieroll Author Profile Page

    | December 14, 2009 4:47 PM



  • facebook has very fun games! the best is footbattle! http://apps.facebook.com/footbattle?zref=pens

    Posted by: Penelope | December 14, 2009 5:40 PM



  • If the shortener is actually used, it gives them first crack at traffic measurement. They could also do pop-ups and pop-unders. But they'd get a big black eye for that. On the other hand, for cell phones there might be actually useful things that could be done with the information.

    Posted by: computer ram | December 14, 2009 7:53 PM



  • Marshall,

    bringing together your piece about content farms and your writing on the realtime web, check out this http://spappco.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/google-twitter-wordpress-facebook-publishsubscribe-matrix-could-explode-into-glass-smooth-platform/

    Which basically lifts whole paragraphs from your piece this afternoon...

     Posted by: Larry Price Author Profile Page

    | December 14, 2009 10:06 PM



  • I saw this from google's site first and I said to myself... I bet Marshall will post on this. But before I checked to see if you wrote anything I signed one of my blogs up to feedburner and added the twitter function.

    I always disliked Feedburner's archaic unfriendly user-interfaces, I still do. Especially it's total lack of friendliness to potential new users who may click on an RSS feed button for the first time.

    Google's slogan is "don't be evil" yet buying something as valuable as feedburner and not doing anything to advance it till now... That's evil. And now to use it for an exclusive URL shortener that doesn't share data the way bit.ly does, that's super double evil.

    Feedburner is still about as friendly to set up as an out of date windows mobile OS. If I was a new user I'd of given up trying to configure it for my word press.org / twitter accounts.

    Feedburner works the way Internet Explorer did when Firefox first started devouring their market share. Feedburner sits back and thinks it doesn't need to innovate anymore, and then when it realizes it has to, it's way too far behind to do so...

    Clearly google bought Feedburner and mothballed it. I knew that already. Yet I gave 'em the benefit of the doubt and tried their improvements today and it still reeks of mothballs.

    I'm gonna go research all the ways I can do what Feedburner does in ways that will do it better. There's gotta be a better new standard than Feedburner? I mean help me out, where can I find more info?

    Posted by: Deane | December 15, 2009 2:02 AM



  • facebook has very fun games! the best is footbattle!

    Mypepitup, Pepitup, Jobscollection, Smashing Web Pro

    Posted by: charm | December 15, 2009 2:50 AM



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