I don’t care what @erickschonfeld says, rsscloud, pubsubhubbub, and liferecorders are going to be pretty sweet.
First of all, rssCloud and Google’s pubsubhubbub (PuSH) offer a glimps of a more scalable solution to the need for real-time data. The internet is, and ever more so, all about the exchange of information. Push technology (such as rssCloud and PuSH) allow us to build the machine bigger – better.
Currently the way many of our daily tools work is by polling. For example, if you use an e-mail client such as outlook what’s happening behind the scenes is that your outlook client is constantly asking the e-mail server “hey, you got e-mail for me yet? how bout’ now? now?…now? how bout now?“. Not terribly efficient. Google’s PuSH and the rssCloud wordpress plugin instead allow the servers to say “you know what? we’ll tell you when we’ve got something for you!”. There’s a lot less overhead incurred in the system if noise is only made when there’s something meaningful to communicate. Google has a great and simple slideshow on this. PuSH and rssCloud vary in use and implementation, but the basic idea is “we’ll tell you when we have something for you, so quit asking”.
I hear you say “Logically, that makes sense, but how does something like a life-recorder fit into this?”. The application that I propose is only one use, and limited in scope, but a use that I find exciting.
I was out running the other day, and in an anaerobic-fermentation induced lactic-acid overload, I was thinking about twitter, push protocols, and this tech crunch article on life-recorders that I read. The wheels started turning. I came up with an example use, but it was lame, and I’m embarrassed to mention it. It planted a seed, however, so when I read the article about students taking photos from space on a $150 budget the idea resurfaced [matured].
Real-time data is important for many things, such as stock-markets and space-flight telemetry. In these uses most users are using a system specifically built for them. Using a device like a life-recorder and push protocols on the internet, anyone can stream real-time telemetry!
Examples include:
- The $150 space-photos device could have an altimeter-life-recorder pushing altitude data every 60 seconds
- I could have a gps-life-recorder pushing real time Google map mashups every 15 minutes when I hike King’s Peak
- runntellmanrun could push followers updates with Google maps, distance traveled, photos, average speed, and weather automatically as he runs barefoot across the country.
Overall I’m pretty excited, especially for the real-time globally-distributed telemetry possibilities. Small scale projects, such as the space-photos project, will be able to broadcast telemetry to the world without having to build the infrastructure of a dedicated system. Aaanndd… getting trashy celebrity news even faster will be nice as well.
