Twitter of Things

When explained the publish-subscribe mechanism of MQTT to the CEO, he understood it on his own way: "So, it's like a twitter of things?". Yes, exactly! That's a perfect analogy.

Devices publish messages, they do tweet, not necessarily even knowing who is listening to. Just like birds are twittering in the trees on my backyard. And then are subscribers "followers", who receive the messages from the sources they are interested in. And not necessarily all messages from one publisher, but only those with relevant topic "hashtag".

Publish-subscribe mechanism

In addition to publisher and subscriber, there exists broker in between, who does the book keeping of subscriptions and delivers messages to whom they belong to. Just like the Twitter service does. So you only receive tweets from those who you're following at. And not necessarily all the messages one publishes, but only those with relevant content "hashtag".