Blogger Joins the Hubbub

When you publish a public blog post, you want to share it with the world—immediately! Blogger helps by feeding your posts to subscribers all over the web. Unfortunately, while we really want things to be as speedy as possible, sometimes it can take a while for the bits to travel through the intertubes.

We're happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the PubSubHubbub protocol, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example, Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub; when it's complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them. FriendFeed, Livedoor Reader (a feed reader popular in Japan), and FavIt already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.

Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don't need to do anything to enable it.

Some more details: All blog post feeds now contain a "hub" element, and will ping Google's hub on every post update. If you're a developer writing code to monitor feeds and want to get updates efficiently in near real-time, you just need to detect the hub link and subscribe to the hub server. Then, sit back and let the hub push updates to you. To learn more about PubSubHubbub and start adding code to your project, see the PubSubHubbub site.

Thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin who worked on a 20% project with the Blogger team to add this support over the past few weeks. We encourage any developer who wants to get a near real-time flow of updates from Blogger to use PubSubHubbub for their application—it's simple, efficient, and lightning fast. If you have questions, you can find answers in our developer support forum, or you can reach us on Twitter: @blogger.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

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