PuSH Bot Marries PubSubHubbub with XMPP

Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share.

PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client.

Sweet!

Oh, and there are a lot of PuSH-enabled feeds, like all the Feedburner, LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, Moveable Type, and Reader Shared Items feeds; check our previous coverage of PuSH, which is apparently the preferred acronym for PubSubHubbub, for more. PuSH is a big deal, and we’ve been noodling ways to use it for Connect, since we serve a lot of feeds.

The ability to read Connect content in IM is something we’ve wanted to implement for a long time, pretty much since FriendFeed debuted their IM implementation, which I really like. Probably the biggest barrier to wholesale adoption of Connect inside the firewall is the necessity to check it for updates; sure, we have feeds, but RSS will never get fully over the hump among enterprise types.

As I’ve said before, our most commonly requested enhancement is email digests, and when polled, nearly all the people who want email notifications would be happy with IM.

Anyway, I’m testing out PuSH Bot for a couple feeds to see how I like it. I’d love to get a PuSH installation going for Connect and install PuSH Bot to serve feeds by IM, assuming we can use it. Maybe Rich will tinker with the Ruby reference implementation of PuSH he just found.

It also occurs to me that PuSH Bot could partially replace (i.e. read, not post) the gone-but-not-forgotten Twitter IM client, which many of us miss terribly. Not exactly what it was, but pretty close.

Anyway, check it out and kudos to Mihai for this sweet PuSH-XMPP gateway.