My own random opinion is that a degree of centralisation (concentration is perhaps a better term) will emerge as a natural facet. It's inevitable that, for practical reasons, there will be a default set of Hubs used by blogs, plugins, etc. Hubs which differentiate themselves well fall into a second line offering services that cater to niche requirements. Features like fast bridging to XMPP, for example, should in time become pretty compelling reasons to use Hubs offering such features.
The more numerous third line will be small scale Hubs catering to a smaller Subscriber base. This level is probably almost impossible to define - we're just way too early into the Pubsubhubbub game to see what small-scale uses for a Hub exist. We're just kicking the protocol out there somewhat blindly unaware of what innovative uses might emerge. Presumably, as I mentioned before on the list, we will hit the OAuth wall soon to let us drag web services outside of blogs into the Hubbub fold. I can say, as a web app developer, that a self-hosted Hub does have some attractions since it leaves us free to implement custom features on top of it. So while such smaller use cases will never become dominant, they will exist and benefit from self-hosting a Hub. If we really do restrict the view to blogs? Then no, there is absolutely no compelling reason to host a Hub yourself. It adds no value, drags the Publisher back into the thundering herd issue (though more as a fleeing herd), and is vastly more complicated than just adding the Publisher. Paddy Pádraic Brady http://blog.astrumfutura.com http://www.survivethedeepend.com OpenID Europe Foundation Irish Representative ________________________________ From: Ravi Pinjala <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, October 15, 2009 8:50:50 PM Subject: [pubsubhubbub] Re: White label hubs Are there any actual advantages to running your own hub? Unless there are some really good ones, I don't see hub proliferation becoming a problem. --Ravi Bob Wyman wrote: > The easy provision of white-label hubs will, of course, lead to the > creation of many more hubs than might otherwise have existed... This > is probably a good thing. But, there are issues... > > It is interesting, I think, to contemplate what the result would be if > *every* blog and feed ended up having its own hub. I don't suggest > this mental experiment because I think that we should seek to achieve > such a state of affairs, but rather because exploring the "extremes" > is always a good way to find issues with specification... > > Clearly, if every feed was its own hub, we would see a need to build > "hubs of hubs" in order to simplify the tasks of managing > subscriptions, controlling message sending patterns, achieving > efficiencies through minimization of connections, aggregation of > notifications, etc. But, it seems that doing that given the PSHB spec > as it stands would not be easy. The problem is that hub discovery > depends on data which is published in the feed itself and there exists > only one class of hubs in the current spec. You can't, for example, > distinguish between a hub and a "hub of hubs"... Also, even if a > "single feed hub" were aggregated by one or more hub of hubs, it is > questionable whether the feed author would know about any of the hubs > of hubs and thus be able to mention them in the feed. > > I think there are issues here that need to be resolved... > > bob wyman > > On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Julien Genestoux > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Hi, > > We just introduced what we call "white-label hubs" at superfeedr > : http://blog.superfeedr.com/API/publishers/pubsubhubbub/white-label-hubs/ > > In a nutshell : your service can give us access to his > stream/firehose and we'll turn that into a PubSubHubbub hub in snap! > > Examples : > - A wordpress.com<http://wordpress.com> PubSubHubbub > : http://wordpress.superfeedr.com/ > - An Identi.caPubSubHubbub : http://identica.superfeedr.com/ > > Let me know what you guys think! > > Ju > > PS: if you're at RWW's realtime event, come and chat : I am > @julien51, the tall french guy wearing a yellow shirt, who looks a > little bit tired (guess why!) > > -- > Julien Genestoux, > > http://twitter.com/julien51 > http://superfeedr.com > > +1 (415) 254 7340 > +33 (0)9 70 44 76 29 > >
