Today Wordpress.com announced RSS Cloud support for all their hosted blogs. Not to be left out of the party, I also installed the RSS Cloud plugin on this blog.

RSS Cloud is an ancient RSS element (in web 2.0 years) that has been given new life recently as the “realtime web” in exploding (thanks to Twitter and Facebook). Basically, it allows RSS readers the ability to be notified when a feed has been updated instead of waiting minutes, hours, or days before that client has a chance to check the feed. Now, an RSS Cloud supported reader that is subscribed to an RSS Cloud enabled feed can be notified within seconds that the feed has been updated. RSS now has a realtime element.

RSS Cloud support is still in it’s infancy with only 1 RSS reader supporting RSS Cloud notifications (River2), but within the coming year, it could become a game-changing technology that can give rise to self hosted Twitter-like publishing platforms. There’s a number of people (myself included) that are working on such platforms, and hopefully I’ll be able to make an announcement in the coming weeks. My feeling is, as great as Wordpress is for blogging, it’s not the ideal platform for micro-blogging. What the community needs is a microblog version of Wordpress that has a real-time element, and I think this RSS Cloud element fits the bill.

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