Extending PubSubHubbub

Yesterday we met at IIW to discuss Facebook's Graph Realtime Api's use cases and why the team decided not to use the current PubSubHubbub specification(0.3). Wei Zhu from Facebook presented some additional arguments to those presented in my earlier post for why PubSubHubbub was not used:

• Lack of topic URLs. Some notifications can only be pushed and there is no way to GET a list of them at a later time. MySpace had the same issue with the firehose. There was no url for it.
  
• One other issue that needs a little bit more work in PubSubHubbub was batching. The current recommendation relies on HTTP Keep-Alives or Atom Feeds.
  

Here are the ideas we presented that can help solve the issue:

1. Give every resource a (topic) URL
   
2. Use OAuth 2.0 for subscription authorization
3. Move hub discovery to the HTTP Response Headers
   

Attendees seem to agree that this is beneficial so we are moving forward with presenting this to the PubSubHubbub mailing list.

Here are the initial changes to the specification:
http://github.com/ciberch/pshb_oauth

I didn't want to put them in the same repo until we got feedback from the mailing list