RSS Cloud & the real-time web!

When Matt Mullengweg announced that WordPress.com was installing RSS Cloud on its 7.5 million blogs, something amazing happened!

RSS Cloud and WordPress.com

All of a sudden, blogs on the WordPress.com platform became almost real-time. In other words, posts will be broadcast almost immediately; allowing bloggers to both deliver real-time content to their RSS subscribers AND potentially share real-time comments with their readers.

Even mashable, possibly the most pro-Twitter site on the ‘net, said that the fusion of WordPress + RSS Cloud could offer Twitter-like speed and be a watershed moment in the real-time web. They are quite right, it could be that big, if the predicted domino effect happens and more RSS readers support it.

The RSS Cloud software can also be installed on self-hosted WordPress blogs, like this one. In fact, we were one of the first news blogs to install it.

Just think: You own your own blog, own all your own content and now potentially, have real-time communications enabled – Which YOU control of everything; rather than Twitter, Facebook, Google etc.

RSS Cloud and social media

I have written a lot over the past couple of weeks, about the problems associated with maintaining control of your online content.  Facebook bought Friendfeed recently and suddenly, Friendfeed users found their data in the hands of a VERY different kind of company; one that many Friendfeed users have privacy issues with.

Other social media sites are just waiting to be acquired and thus, users are left wondering; “who will eventually have ownership of our pictures, posts, tweets etc?”

Right now, only one RSS reader supports RSS Cloud (Dave Winer’s River2).  However, now that WordPress.com’s 7.5 million users are enabled, I guarantee the major RSS readers will support it very soon.

The real-time web is about to get very interesting – But so is the potential for us, the users, to have full control over our online content and networks.