New Netvibes Will Be World's Biggest Real-Time Feed Reader
The next version of popular web dashboard service Netvibes will push "near real-time" updates from feeds to the browser, a dramatic change in how the service works. Those feeds will be served up along with the standard suite of functional widgets the company has always provided.
As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.
In an unembargoed presentation sent to press this morning, Netvibes said that it would be adding support to its next version for both Pubsubhubbub and RSS Cloud protocols. When those technologies are used to tell Netvibes that new items are available, the items will be pushed automatically to the browsers of subscribers - with no browser refresh required.
Code named Wasabi, the version will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December's Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.
Support for real-time feeds has so far been much stronger on the publisher side than the consumer technology side. With blog publishing services WordPress, Blogger and Typepad all adding Pubsubhubbub or RSSCloud feeds to their offerings, there are now hundreds of millions of real-time feeds available in those two formats. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer's own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds. Real time didn't come up in interviews this week with the creators of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
Google Reader implemented very limited support for PubSubHubbub in August, just pushing a Hubbub feed of "shared items" from Reader to the now-Facebook owned FriendFeed. In that case Google Reader was playing the part of the publisher and FriendFeed was the reader. Google's Brad Fitzpatrick has told us that when PubSubHubbub support allowed FriendFeed to wait for updates from Reader, instead of polling regularly to check for updates, traffic between the two services was cut by 85%.
From decreased server costs to an improved experience for users to increased time-on-site, the benefits of real-time feeds can be many. Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product? Some developers experimenting with these new real-time feeds elsewhere have reported stumbling blocks in the process, and Netvibes hasn't had a perfect record of service for users in all locations around the world, either. Long caching of feeds has been an issue for Netvibes, though, and this update will cut down substantially on the delays that users see after feeds of interest have published new content.
Invitations to the private beta will roll out later this week, giving a few hundred users an opportunity to see the new Netvibes for themselves.
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I wonder if Netvibes is a day late, dollar short? Time will tell of course, but this isn't very exciting news to be quite honest.
Rex
Rex, they are first to market among major feed readers. Why would they be late?
Exciting news! Can't wait to use this new version!
Do you have any idea how many people use Netvibes? I think it has great promise, but haven't found much of my audience to be using it. Really, haven't found many that know about it or know why they might use it.
Maybe my answer lies in the post "Web Aggregation: What Works, What Doesn't"
this will be important to the 100's of netvibes users.
The good news is that _any_ feed consumer/reader can do that in minutes with Superfeedr (and that works already... not at LeWeb in 6 weeks!).
:)
This is pretty cool. Everyone is looking out for who will emerge as the best real time search engine. Currently, there's Twitter, but it's not comprehensive. Google has so far been unable to provide true real-time search, though they just signed an agreement with Twitter. I'll be keeping my eyes on NetVibes to see how this works out. -Rob
YEAH! This is great news! Thanks for the write-up, Marshall.
Real time RSS is an oxymoron; who cares about getting RSS delivered in "near real time"???
"Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first" How do you back this kind of bold claim? I am frankly disappointed: I thought that you (and RRW) of all people understand a little better the technologies in play!
Edwin, maybe what Marshall was trying to get at is this, Google Reader/iGoogle has the lion's share of RSS readership according to our numbers at Pheedo - 60%+ market share. They are pulling in millions of feeds for millions of consumers. Because of their size, they have to move slow and be cautious. They need to consider the downstream ramifications before adding something like PuSH. My guess is they are testing it. Feedburner said they will support it. But if the biggest RSS news aggregator doesn't support real-time updates, it will have little affect.
Publishers are ready, Pheedo/Feedburner are ready and now the RSS readers have to step-up. Kudos to Netvibes for stepping up. The news readers/software right now is what is holding back Real-time updates of RSS.
Where does this leave us really. More and more feeds updating faster and faster ... Is any one seeing any logic in that? Should we stay hypnotized in front of large screens flickering forever?
Pfff. Non sense.