Popular content management system and blogging platform Wordpress has turned on support for a new technology that enables people to receive push notifications of feed updates on Web sites and blogs.
The service, called RSS Cloud, may just breathe new life into RSS readers – which until now have relied on readers periodically checking for updates.
Wordpress, which tracks more than 50,000,000 posts read via RSS, has enabled support for the 7.5 million blogs on Wordpress.com.
“Can you imagine waiting an hour to get your emails?” wrote Matt Mullenweg on the Wordpress blog.
Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com.
“RSS Cloud is an extra element in your RSS feed that allows subscribers to say “Hey, let me know as soon as you’ve updated, kthx.”
WordPress.com has always supported update pings through Ping-o-Matic for services such as Google Reader, but RSS Cloud will allow anybody to register to receive updates based on their interests.
So far, only a couple of readers support RSS cloud, but Wordpress expects that to quickly change.
“We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible.”
All blogs on Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress blogs that install the RSSCloud plugin can make instant updates available.