PubSubHubbub is a protocol that defines a method for updates, comments, or posts to be easily syndicated and shared between a root site and any subscriber sites that syndicate the content of articles, posts, or any other data from the root site.
PubSubHubbub accomplishes this through the use of relaying hubs. A
topic site or feed URL declares the hub to be used within its RSS or
ATOM feed file as a link
element.
This hub may be hosted by the feed publisher or on a community platform
hub that provides services for anyone. A subscriber would then fetch the
publisher feed, read the hub information, and then subscribe to the hub
in order to get updates. This will allow the subscriber to subscribe to
the particular feed that she is interested in seeing updates for. When
the publisher updates or changes the feed content, it would ping the hub
stating that there is a change. The hub then fetches the content and
multicasts the new or changed content out to all subscribers.
In effect, this protocol enables syndication of activities, publications, articles, or any other piece of social data out of the hosted container. This can effectively widen the reach of the social network to a host of subscribers.
An OpenSocial container, for the most part, can be considered a social silo. A container defines its social information for only its site and, unless other means are built in, it may only allow off-site access to that information through the use of RESTful endpoints for the social data. This can be inefficient because the external service has to periodically poll the endpoints to check for updates to the data source.
PubSubHubbub can effectively eliminate the need for third-party services to do this. By subscribing to particular feeds from the social container, a service can be notified as changes occur. Building the ability to define update hubs for data would readily change the way in which activities or updates are managed through OpenSocial.
In addition, the capability to define a syndication hub could be integrated into the specification to make the process as seamless as possible.
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