ReadWriteWeb

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

The phrase "real-time web" may make you think about Twitter, Facebook, or perhaps real-time stock market trading, but there are actually hundreds of companies all around the world working on building and leveraging different types of real-time delivery of data online. In preparation for this week's ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a forthcoming research report on the topic, we've now had extended conversations with nearly 50 companies in this space. The breadth of offerings, technologies and strategies is amazing.

We offer below one way to think about this broad market. We hope it's useful and interesting.

Can being "present in the now" be packaged and sold as a service? A number of companies believe that it can be and are aiming to offer a "real-time" layer of functionality to consumer websites and businesses interested in this growing trend online.

On one hand it's just a speed up the infrastructure play, but the impact of real time information delivery on a user's experience of a website can be profound. The latest entrant into this market of white label real time service layers is called Notify.me.