I had a phone talk today with Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google today about their Pubsubhubbub service. When I did the verbal walk-through I fully understood what they're trying to do. I wrote it up in a blog post on Scripting News today. Basically they started from zero and did more or less what the element in RSS 2.0 does. In general I prefer if people use existing formats and protocols, but in this case there's not much harm because as far as I know there has been very little or no uptake in the element. So I don't think using a different protocol will actually break anyone. However if the choice were mine, I wouldn't have taken the chance. But they made the choice not me.
However when I read the Google spec, I couldn't make heads or tails of what it would mean for me. It's so full of Atom and so thoroughly doesn't support RSS. All my apps use RSS, and I'm not planning on re-coding them. And I can't endorse or even support a protocol that requires conversion. So I'm going to try to produce a parallel approach that does for RSS what they do for Atom.
