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I have an RSS feed I'm monitoring for changes. Is there some web service that provides a way to be notified by email immediately** when a new post is added?

** When I say immediately, I mean within 1 - 2 minutes.

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See also: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/2911/… – Senseful Aug 6 '10 at 23:17
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As RSS does not have an push protocol but it's based on pulling I don't think there is a service that does it. To have an notification time of 2 minutes the service needs to download the feed 720 times a day and might get blocked by the website. – neo Aug 7 '10 at 11:02
@neo RSS Cloud is an extension to the RSS protocol that enables real-time push notifications – systempuntoout Aug 8 '10 at 2:45
@systempuntoot: Yes, but as all with all other new protocol both sides needs to support it, the client and the server. – neo Aug 8 '10 at 12:05
@neo Wordpress, SixApart, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous have adopted PubSubHubbub. – systempuntoout Aug 9 '10 at 13:56

1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote accepted

George, you need to check if the publisher's feed is pushing its RSS feed with some push protocol; PubSubHubbub for example.

PubSubHubbub is an open protocol for distributed Publish/subscribe communication on the internet. The protocol extends the Atom and RSS protocols for data feeds. The main purpose is to provide near-instant notifications of change updates, which would improve on the typical situation where a client periodically polls the feed server at some arbitrary interval.

Here an hub hosted on Google App Engine. Give it a try.

You could also register to Superfeedr that handles pushed contents via PubSubHubbub, RSSCloud, XML-RPC or SUP.
Answering some comments, if your feed's publisher does not use this kind of push technology, superfeedr (via polling) guarantee delivery of new entries within 15 minutes of their publication.

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But it has to be implemented on the publisher side, too. – neo Aug 7 '10 at 13:58
doesn't it only work if the publisher implements this? Can I take any random feed that I subscribe to and use PubSubHubbub with it? – Senseful Aug 8 '10 at 0:46
@eagle See my edit. – systempuntoout Aug 8 '10 at 2:35
thanks for the clarification. – Senseful Aug 8 '10 at 3:54

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