There's a Reason RSSCloud Failed to Catch On
WordPress and Dave Winer are working together to bring real-time, Twitter-style updates to RSS feeds using the cloud element and the accompanying RSSCloud Interface. Yesterday, WordPress added RSS cloud support to “all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com.”
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Dave Winer's long-running push to make RSS real-time finally landing at platform scale. He made the case against slow, polled feeds back in "How RSS can bust through" in February 2006, and had been building his own aggregator since late 2005 to test what RSS needed next; meanwhile criticism of WordPress.com's feeds dates to October 2005, so the host had both motive and history here.
What changed this week is deployment, not design: WordPress implemented the cloud element and the RSSCloud Interface across all 7.5 million WordPress.com blogs overnight, converting a years-old spec argument into installed base. The headline's own framing — that RSSCloud previously failed to catch on — makes the stakes explicit: whether a single large host flipping a default can force reader-side adoption where the spec alone never did.
First-order effects
- Every one of WordPress.com's 7.5 million blogs can now ping subscribers the moment a post publishes, eliminating poll-and-refresh delay for any feed reader that implements the RSSCloud Interface.
- Dave Winer gets the mass deployment he never secured alone: his protocol is now live by default on the largest managed blogging platform.
Second-order effects
- Feed-reader developers face a fork — implement cloud notification or serve WordPress.com content visibly slower than the same posts reaching Twitter timelines, making latency the competitive axis rather than feature count.
- Other hosted blogging platforms come under pressure to adopt the same cloud element, since real-time freshness becomes a table-stakes expectation their customers can now compare against.
Third-order effects
- If reader adoption still lags despite 7.5 million blogs pinging, the lesson for open-web protocol efforts is structural: distribution now hinges on host-side defaults set by large platforms, not on spec quality or author advocacy — the same asymmetry open standards face against Twitter's closed, fast pipeline.
The trend: Real-time publishing is moving from polled RSS toward push notification, and large hosting platforms' default settings — not protocol designers — are deciding which open standards reach critical mass.