The latest BlogBridge development release introduces a new foundational capability, the Reading List Ping. I think it’s an important idea, which was inspired by Ted Shelton  during our collaboration with The Personal Bee (check it out!)

BlogBridge is one of the first aggregators that both publishes and subscribes to OPML Reading Lists. As you may know, you can ask that any Guide in BlogBridge be published out as a as an OPML Reading List to share with anyone. As you may also know with BlogBridge and also some other products you can subscribe to anyone’s published OPML reading list.

So when my Reading List changes and something else is subscribed to it, how does one know about the other?

Today, what happens is that everyone polls any Reading List they want to follow. As more and more people both publish and subscribe to OPML Reading Lists, the polling that we are all doing isn’t going to scale.

With me so far? With BlogBridge 2.17 we introduce the Reading List Ping. With a simple global preference, the user can point to another service who wishes to be notified of any changes in an OPML Reading List. So, instead of having to poll all the time to see if a list has changed, services can now ask to be notified.

It’s a little bit of plumbing that can make a whole class of new applications and services possible. Technically this is really just a baby step. What will be required probably is a third party service that can connect publishers and subscribers, analogous to what we have for RSS Feeds. But for now BlogBridge is taking the first step. Maybe others will follow.

Technorati Tags: lockergnome, OPML, readinglists