ReadWriteWeb

There's just ten days left until the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. We've got an incredible group of people coming together to discuss the broad work being done across the real-time web and the deep consequences of this new way for information to be distributed.

We hope you'll join us in person, there's just 50 tickets left at the current price, but if you're unable to come then please put it down on your calendar to watch the live video stream of selected sessions. Here's three things you should know about the event.

Gmail user Dan McGee writes that he's found a new feature in his Gmail that places small favicons next to certain email messages in the inbox view. The icons have appeared next to emails sent from commercial services like Netflix and make those messages stand out when users quickly scan a crowded inbox.

This new feature is not just a simple productivity enhancement or advertisement. The icons are there to indicate which messages include "enhanced content" - real-time updates within the body of the email messages, from companies sending the emails.

We're happy to report that energy is high for the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th; in addition to a strong Silicon Valley presence, companies are coming from around the world to participate.

We want to take a moment to highlight five international companies that will be at the Summit. We really appreciate the distance they are traveling to help make this event an important one. You can learn about more highlighted participants signed up so far on this page and you can sign up to join us here.

Google Wave is one of the most-hyped new product launches in recent memory, but now that thousands of lucky people are getting to try it out - early reactions are mixed. If the hard-core geeks aren't sure if they like it, that could spell serious trouble for mainstream adoption.

Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are three tech blogger geeks that love to use new tools and all got to test Google's new real-time communication platform Wave today. It's possible that when the rush is over the Wave experience will seem less overwhelming, but the kinds of initial reactions these three had aren't good.

The Real-Time Web - it's more than just immediate delivery of Twitter messages to an always-on mobile device, disrupting the concentration that civilization is based on and bringing a rush to crazed social media addicts obsessed with the hottest new buzzwords. No, there are scores of companies building and selling systems today that deliver very real value via the real-time web.

We've interviewed 40 companies in the real-time web market in preparation for the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a companion research report. Below are nine solid examples of real-time web technology that illustrate what it is and why it's important - and one possible future scenario that's important enough it has to be discussed as well.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

Real-time web protocol PubSubHubbub's co-creator Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters today about how the new information delivery system works and how Facebook can support it.

He's published his deck on his blog and we've embedded it below as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day. If you're interested in making your content available in real time or more efficiently using real-time content syndicated from elsewhere, this presentation is a must-see.

The real-time web is a broad and rich phenomenon emerging online. A wide variety of companies are building and using it in really diverse ways. YourVersion offers a real-time discovery engine for finding streams of content about topics you're interested in. Aardvark is using friends of friends networks, profile data built up over time and presence information ("the real-time web of people") to deliver answers to almost any question you can ask it. Kaazing uses HTML5 WebSockets to open secure, persistent connections to push data and allow financial institutions to use web interfaces instead of installed software, often for the first time. Those are just three of the many different companies on the cutting edge of the real-time web.

Because this field is so new and is seeing such breadth of innovation, people have a lot of questions about it. Next month we're hosting a full-day event to engage with those questions together, called the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Below are some of our favorite questions that Early Bird registrants said last week that they want to tackle

As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, which is just over two weeks away, in this post we're listing 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies - so we invite you to list more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top 100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.

A reminder that the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit is happening 15th October in Mountain View, California. Many of the ReadWriteWeb team will be there, so we look forward to meeting and talking with you all! You can register here for the low price of $195.

Jon Swartz wrote a long article in USA Today this morning about the phenomenon of the real-time web. The article blames "the real-time web" for declining test scores in school, anti-social addictions, short attention spans and texting-while-driving. Swartz smooshes YouTube, social networks, online banking, location-aware search and social media marketing all under the same umbrella of doom.

We'd like to highlight Swartz's work as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day because it's a great example of the same old Fear of the Internet getting a new name. As a result, USA Today readers lose an opportunity to understand an important new wave of change and opportunity.