Firehose
WordPress.com bloggers and visitors produce thousands of new posts and comments every hour. With the addition of IntenseDebate comments, this is a lot of data. These content streams are available in two real-time formats from redundant servers. They are intended for partners like search engines and market intelligence providers who would like to ingest a real-time stream of new content from a wide spectrum of publishers.
The first format, PubSub (XEP-0060), is an extension of the popular Jabber/XMPP instant messaging protocol. WordPress.com operates a Jabber service at im.wordpress.com that allows all WordPress.com users to subscribe to the blogs of their choice and receive instant notification of new items. However, the full streams are access-controlled.
The second format delivers the same streams by the much simpler mechanism of an HTTP GET request. This makes implementing the streams as simple as possible. You can view a limited sample of these streams in your browser: posts and comments. (If your browser doesn’t display anything after a few seconds, try Esc or Stop.) This format is still experimental and changing rapidly. Feedback is warmly appreciated.
The use of the Firehose service is covered by our WordPress.com terms of service.
Please contact us at [email protected] to request trial access and pricing information.
The WordPress.com firehose is also available from Gnip.
