Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.

Pubsubhubbub

Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook's FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication.

Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it.

RSSCloud

RSSCloud is a technology that's been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience.

RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn't deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress.

The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe, which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall.

Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web's leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management.

Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we'd be fools to not watch what he's doing.

Facebook

Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal.

Google Real-Time Search

Twitter search

Whether you're watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme - millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages.

Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site's new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important - in ways that could change our day-to-day lives.

Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10

Superfeedr

Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today. Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now.

Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year.

Tornado

This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year.

Breaking News Online's iPhone App

It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year.

Aardvark

Cliqset

Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time!

The app uses the iPhone's new push notification service to deliver important news updates from around the world to your phone with some control over priority levels and a delivery shut-off time scheduling option. It isn't perfect, but is it worth two bucks to get important world news updates pushed automatically to your phone? You bet it is.

The app is a stream of very short news updates, some with links but most without. Not all notices are marked for push notification, but you can turn on push for low priority messages. In the last two hours, for example, BNO has pushed out eight news updates and five of them have been marked high priority. Three were about an unusually intense wave of earthquakes off the coast of Mexico, which seems like pretty high priority. Both the official news updates and the team's personal Twitter updates demonstrate that the network is made up of humanitarians.

Audio notifications can be turned on or off and you can set times during which messages aren't delivered. That's nice. We'd really like to see other services offer this kind of functionality for more niche news topics, or RSS feeds of our selection.

BNO isn't the only news app that uses the new push notification, but it does appear to be the most prolific. The Associated Press app, for example, seldom pushes out more than a few notices in an entire week. The BNO app isn't super polished or complex; it isn't a good way to read in-depth news, but it is very fast and quite well-suited to the modern news addict. It's well worth the $1.99 price tag.

Update: Andrew Nystrom from the LA Times leaves a very interesting comment below reminding us of this app's plan to charge a monthly $1 subscription fee, something that was mistakenly left out of the iTunes app store description! Is the app still worth it? We have no doubt that it is. One dollar per month is a trivial fee for a mobile push connection to the freshest news on the web. Not everyone will feel that way, though.

In September 2007, when seventeen years old and living in the Netherlands, van Poppel decided to launch a news aggregation business called Breaking News Online. Months later, somehow, he came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters.

Why BNO is Exciting

Three days after van Poppel sold the Bin Laden tape to Reuters, he said in an interview with Inside Cable News that he'd originally reached out to CNN's iReport with the tape. They were unresponsive. He then tried to contact a number of other news outlets before connecting with and making a deal with Reuters. Breaking News Online had already launched months earlier, but the experience must have underlined van Poppel's belief that he could find, select and push out news faster and better than other larger media outlets. The experience probably provided some funds for that vision as well.

Since then, BNO has added editors in the United States, Ireland and Mexico to its team. The team watches news wires closely for important updates, exercises their own brand of editorial judgment in deciding what to push out through their various distribution channels and then they push it out fast.

BNO has made the most of a number of different media technologies. The team is best known for its presence on Twitter - at 800k, BNO has four times more followers than ABC News and twice as many as Newsweek. BNO also makes extensive use of RSS, email, FriendFeed and now promises an iPhone app leveraging the phone's brand new push messaging sometime next month.

In a media landscape that some argue has transcended the old models of scarcity and physical distribution - it could be efficient research infrastructure, high-quality editorial judgment and building online channels of distribution that make the difference. Or, as blogger Mike Bracco put it on The Next Web today, "Unlike their mainstream counterparts the service does a great job of only reporting news worthy of the 'breaking' label. I can attest to this as well as their ability to deliver breaking news before anyone else. I have found them to consistently report news 10-15 minutes before it hits mainstream websites or blogs and well before it is ever reported on TV." In the news game today, being best and first by minutes means it's your link that gets passed along. Breaking News Online is excelling at that game with its short, quick updates.

On the Other Hand...

Now BNO says it will enter the world of the iPhone in August. Every major media outlet is building its own iPhone app but few if any others are charging money for them. The BNO app will cost $1.99 to download. Even crazier, BNO says it will charge an ongoing subscription fee of 99 cents per month for breaking news updates.

All of this is fascinating, but isn't BNO still just an aggregator? In traditional media outlets "aggregator" is a dirty word (unless they are the ones doing the aggregation). In fact, Breaking News Online does very little original reporting. The company is going to monetize its research flow, editorial judgment, distribution channels...and links to other peoples' content. If BNO is successful, there is a real risk of original content publishers objecting to the fact that someone else has found a way to make money off of (links sending traffic to) their content.

Imagine if the Huffington Post charged money for an iPhone app that pushed links to its pages aggregating content from elsewhere. Major media companies would blow a gasket. Ariana Huffington told those companies at a Congressional hearing on saving newspapers this Spring that if she sends them millions of readers and they can't figure out how to monetize that traffic - that's their problem. Some companies gasping for air didn't find that convincing and insist that aggregators hand over some of the only money that anyone in the media ecosystem has figured out how to make online. Admittedly, if the professional reporters on the ground aren't getting paid - then there's going to be less content for aggregators to aggregate.

BNO says it doesn't think of itself as primarily an aggregator, van Poppel says it will do even more original reporting as the company expands.

The internet is changing everything and it's changing itself fast enough that it's a challenge to keep track of it all. Recurring, mobile micropayments for near real-time aggregated news content delivered using push delivery? It's hard to think of a sentence that packs more hot-button concepts into such a small space. That's pretty impressive for a 19 year old.