Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Glad to see that PubSub has returned as Something Simpler because I loved the technology so much that I wrote a PubSub HOW TO way back in November 2004! Go Something Simpler go! I have lots of ideas that could be implemented with their technology like 'searching the future for ads' (I will shortly be buying another CompactFlash card, a FireWire CF reader and a MacBook Pro and would love to get a feed of ads for these things!)

Finally, Salim is blogging. Welcome! What took you so long. More please! Disclosure blah blah blah!

From Evolution of the Internet.:

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After the rollout of messaging and request/response, we are now entering the third wave of the internet, the publish/subscribe decade. The web has been phenomonally successful and the amount of information available on it is overwhelming. However, (as Bill rightly points out), that information is largely passive - you must look it up with a browser. Clearly the next step in that evolution is for the information to become active and tell you when something happens.

Blogs and RSS are the first general manifestation of publish/subscribe. The real reason for the explosion of RSS/blogging is the ability to "subscribe" to a blog or feed and be told "whenever". We can expect this theme to dominate the next several years of the internet.

What Bill refers to as the "active web", or Doc as the "live" web, we refer to as the pubsub web (ok, so we"re not the greatest marketers). Our whinge would be that it"s the implementation of publish/subscribe on the internet that will make the web active. People often talk about PointCast as the first major effort to "live" up the web. It was an effort, but not very well implemented.

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Go PubSub go! Disclosure: Salim and I went to high school together, we went to the same university (but different engineering programs so not the same class!) and we are friends!

From PubSub's speed unmatched on the Internet.:

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"We are the other half of Google, and we complement them. Google is retrospective search and we are prospective search. In other words, Google searches the past and we search the future," Salim said in an interview at a recent Harvard conference.

Google news alerts and eBay auction alerts are similar but glacial; sometimes taking days to notify users, in comparison to Pubsub's split-second matching capability. "No one can match our speed of three billion matches per second. We have a unique algorithm, and as far as we know, nobody has ever been able to do what we've done," Salim said. "It makes information active rather than passive."

The "engine" is based on Wyman's expertise and experience. He is the chief technology officer at PubSub and an Internet pioneer who developed predecessors to Lotus Notes and the first known wide-area-network hypertext system, among other innovations.

Salim, Pubsub's chairman, is a University of Waterloo graduate in theoretical physics who gravitated toward business and computers.

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