1script - 8:24 pm on Feb 3, 2013 (gmt 0)

Tedster, if you're still interested in the subject matter, I wanted to add some of my own observations here after about 6 weeks of using PuSH on one of my sites just for a test.

I have to admit, I feel even more skeptical about it now than I did before starting this thread and starting the test. I'll try to explain:

My biggest confusion about this whole PuSH thing, specifically as it relates to authorship and Google, was that there seemed to be no way to make (or entice - whatever word you'd use for an inanimate software bot) Google to subscribe to my PuSH pings.

And that's exactly what I'm seeing now. Within less than 2 hours from my installing a PuSH hub (WP plugin) , I could see two entities have subscribed:
Yandex and linksalpha .appspot. com (whoever they are). And for the longest time there was no one else until about a week ago some other seemingly random appspot app had subscribed: pshb-service .appspot .com

I could some *some* use in Yandex subscription because I do get valid traffic from Russia on this site but the other two - I could find no information on them and for all I know, they might as well be cutting-edge scrapers.

But still no Google subscription!

During these 6 weeks several updates have been posted, all indexed by Google within hours, and one of the posts specifically has gotten pretty big coverage in related popular blogs etc. In other words, it's a living and breathing site, developing at normal pace, visited by regular Googlebot often. So, there would seemingly be no reason Google would not subscribe if this is really what they generally want to do when they see the <atom:link rel='hub' href='http://example.com/?pushpress=hub'/> line in a feed.

Do you think I'm missing/messing something in the implementation or has the importance of PuSH update been slightly exaggerated? Any particular steps to take to steer Google towards your hub?