PubSub now offers HTTP-REST delivery of messages; this means you can integrate PubSub services and real-time message delivery in your applications.
This service is currently EXPERIMENTAL and is subject to change. However if you'd like to try it out, we welcome your feedback. We can't provide a lot of technical support at the moment, so we recommend that you only try out the REST API if you have some experience building web applications. If you have any specific problems or comments on the service, post a comment on this article or respond to feedback@pubsub.com.
If you'd like to try out the PubSub REST API service, visit our REST page at https://www.pubsub.com/REST.
A number of people are asking what makes PubSub different from other services. It's easy to look at PubSub and Feedster, for example, and decide that we're not offering anything new.
That's unfortunate because it ignores a lot of what makes PubSub special. What you see on our website is just the beginning of what we're going to do with PubSub. To understand where we're going, there are a couple of general concepts that you should get to know.
• A Generalized Service
The first of these is that PubSub is a generalized service for doing content-based matching. We started with weblogs because we think the weblog space is really interesting and we believe that it represents a major new method of communication. However there's nothing about our service that's specific to weblogs; we can process any kind of structured data, and in fact for us, the more structure the better. That means given a data feed in XML of jobs, or cars, or classified ads, we can do really specific content-based matching in real-time.
• Push vs. Pull
The next key concept is push-vs.-pull. It's important to recognize that most search engines require a specific "pull" operation to get data. Even the great Google Alerts service requires a pull operation, although that's hidden from the user. PubSub, on the other hand, pushes out data in real time. As long as we have a way to deliver data to users, be that RSS or REST or SMTP, we'll send a matching message as soon as we receive it. I won't go into any more detail on this topic here, but be sure to read Bob Wyman's weblog entry on the subject.
Welcome to the PubSub weblog, where we'll talk about the site and (hopefully) get some comments and some feedback from users.
This blog isn't officially open yet. If you wander in here, please feel free to ask questions - but don't be offended if we don't respond for a little while.
The PubSub site is just getting started - we've only been live for a few days. We hope that you like the service and find it useful - please let us know!