Insights Delimited By Time

Came across a significant post by JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist @BT) reckoning 2010 as the Year of the Platform.

Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter  draws leadership lessons from the late Edward Kennedy’s life.

Last week some folks from Google released a new lightweight publish subscribe protocol called pubsubhubbub that interestingly also includes a new an ATOM extension. This is one of the first attempts to solve the polling issue that currently plagues feed aggregators such as Friend Feed etc.
At the outset one thing to bear in mind is that this is not a mechanism that browser/desktop based feed subscribers can leverage. For that we will have to wait for Web Sockets to become standard. As far as pubsubhubbub goes you need to be a distributor or an aggregator of some kind to find this useful, very useful indeed.
More information can be found on the project’s wiki but the first 12 slides of this one presentation in particular I think explains the mechanism involved quite succinctly.
For those who want to see this idea in action I recommend watching the video where friend feed is shown leveraging this protocol.

What stands out for a REST enthusiast like me is that the way a feed describes its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file. This is done via a link relation called hub(link rel=”hub”) .
Of late there have been many before whom I have had to be quite tongue-tied explaining the possible pragmatic uses of the notion of hypermedia. So you can imagine my excitement on seeing a link relation being used as a significant part of this protocol. In fact all the fun starts with that one link relation. This clearly is a humble beginning to popularize web-style messaging.

Okay…now I am off to build a hub. Should be fun!! Once I have it ready it will be time to convince an enter-pricey architect to use this idea. LOL :)!!!