How big of a deal is RSSCloud?

The news (via TechCrunch)—a few weeks old now due to this post getting stuck in Draft limbo—that Wordpress has just made all of their blogs RSSCloud-enabled seems like a pretty big deal to me. While it might seem like RSS is real-time, it actually isn't. Depending on the setup, it can take minutes to hours for your reader to be updated once a feed you subscribe to has been updated.

Web 2.0 coding equivalent of a rock star, Shannon Whitley, offers a great examination of RSS Cloud on his blog. While it is a bit technical for me, it still gives a bit more information about how RSSCloud will work.

While the idea of real-time RSS feeds is pretty interesting, I wonder how many people will actually notice this lack of delay on their favourite blog.

Or will we see new uses for it? Will it make it easier to, say, cover a sports game play-by-play and have those updates happen on people's mobile devices/computers in real-time?

But how big of a deal is RSSCloud, really?

-Parker