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.

Flipboard

Selected coverage: Flipboard, New "Social" iPad Magazine will be Powered by Semantic Data

Flipboard is a well-funded iPad app that turns Twitter and other streams of content into a beautiful "customized magazine." Many people have tried to go deep on the visual impact of feed reading on the iPad, but none have embraced the possibilities as gracefully as Flipboard.

You know how I use Flipboard? I read my usual Twitter and Facebook streams through it sometimes, but it's the curated topical Twitter lists that work best on this service. I've got a Twitter list of hundreds of geotechnology pros that serve up incredible topical links. The Twitter list of anthropologists I grabbed from Tlists? What a great magazine they make every Sunday morning!

Web page pre-loading in the background, integrated social media sharing and commenting, video, image collages - the user experience is really hard to beat and it's only getting better. OPML import is the only thing that the 15 of us in the world that like to play with OPML files could ask for more.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Some people have the audacity to complain that this magical creature that turns links to their website into shining, seductive, glossy magazine pages for iPad using readers to slide right down into their websites... is violating their copyrights! That's the dumbest thing I've heard since someone told me that the tens of thousands of readers a Huffington Post link to our site sends are somehow a case of that site stealing from us, too.

Postrank
Selected coverage: How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic

RSS overload getting you down? Give Postrank a feed and it will give you back a brighter day. This service, which has been on our best of list every year we've written one about feeds, is invaluable. You plug in a feed and Postrank will score every item in it based on the relative social media engagement that item has seen (comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter and a lot more). Then, you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the most-discussed items on any feed.

We use Postrank about 15 different ways here at ReadWriteWeb. It's awesomeness cannot be surpassed. Watch this space, you'll see us use it some more ways in the coming weeks and months.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Postrank's main home page is now a publisher analytics fancy service. If you want to run other peoples' feeds through it, like a sophisticated strategic thinker able to defer immediate gratification for one technology step in exchange for far greater opportunities, then visit http://postrank.com/main.

Notify.me
Selected coverage: Real Time as a Service? Check Out What Notify.me Is Working On

The battlefield of RSS to IM/SMS/email delivery and alert services is littered with bodies - the field of battle between those services and the cold reality of monetization, that is. There are a small number of people who appreciate the delivery of a substantial number of RSS feeds within minutes of their publication, but it's not an insignificant number. It's services like this that keep all the tech blogs you read feeling fresh, readers. Other people in other fields are learning to appreciate them as well.

Notify.me remains alive, despite its own determination to die this summer. The company is now focused on selling advanced services to large, paying customers; it's expensive shooting RSS feeds all over the web by IM and SMS for free.

In July, 2010, the Notify.me team threw up its hands and said it was shutting down its free consumer service. A minor cry for help arose and thankfully, the company changed its mind. It said it was going to start charging people a small amount of money. It doesn't appear to have done so and the messages are still coming.

Let me tell you what a service like this is good for, outside a journalist's immediate interest: I once led a workshop for non-profit organizations where one participant worked in communications at a local women's advocacy organization. In that workshop, we grabbed the RSS feed for the New York Times and we ran it through a filter, filtering for keywords related to the field she worked in. We then took that filtered feed and we put it through Notify.me, setting it for multiple forms of delivery.

The plan, then, was for her to get an SMS whenever the New York Times wrote a story related to women's issues. She could take a look at it, and if appropriate, could call the local newspaper people she knew. "I don't know if you've heard," she could say (they probably hadn't, so soon), "but there's this story breaking on a national level. If you're interested in a local angle, our Executive Director is an excellent source and would be happy to get on the phone with you if you like." The reporter has been looking for something to write about all day and you lay a timely, high-quality interviewee in their lap. Boom! Now repeat a few times and what have you got? You've got an organization that people in your area associate with the issue because you're regularly cited as a source in the local media - because you were the first to know.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet. Someday it probably will be. Another service will have to take its place, or we'll all have to learn how to roll our own.

SuperFeedr
Selected coverage: The Dream Team Quietly Gathering Behind Real-Time Service SuperFeedr

You've got online content and you want it in real time. You want it in different formats. You want it marked up with geolocation data that corresponds to place names occurring in free text. You want it all and you want it for a fair price. What does it mean? Maybe you want SuperFeedr. It's like FeedBurner was for bloggers, but much more developer-focused. The company adds features all the time and founder Julien Genestoux is one of the most agile technologists you'll find online.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Barely born yet, but backed by BetaWorks and Mark Cuban, that's good for something. Plus Genestoux builds features so fast that he'll likely fit whatever need real-time feed geeks find they have, well into the future.

Google Reader
Selected coverage: Facebook Could Become World's Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

If you read RSS feeds and you know it, you probably use Google Reader. It's ok. It's pretty good, even. It's not that exciting, but it serves a whole lot of people very reliably and capably. It has survived while everyone else has not. This year we saw former market-leader Bloglines and former innovation leader Newsgator Online close up their RSS readers and send everyone to Google Reader instead. Other services use Google Reader as a place to sync up.

Not Dead Yet Factor: Google almost never kills anything, and there have to be a lot of people internally at the company who depend on Google Reader, too. Unless they've all given it up for Twitter.

My6Sense
Selected coverage: My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World

You're on your phone and you want something good to read? They say that small screens lend to high-quality recommendations of well-targeted content - so why would we read Twitter and Facebook?

My6Sense is a mobile RSS reader that syncs with your Google Reader account (all of it, not just the first one thousand feeds like so many imitations!) and then watches how you interact with the items. It knows when you are reading, it knows when you've shared a link. It then offers two views of all your subscriptions: their most recent posts and the My6Sense recommended posts. The service learns from your behavior over time and offers a quality mobile feed reading experience.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's probably a slow burn, the company is focusing on monetizing a commercial API. That's a good business to be in.

Blekko
Selected coverage: How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job

Blekko calls itself a search spam killer but it's got a whole lot more potential for the power user.

Blekko is a platform for collaboratively edited vertical custom search engines. It eats OPML files, among other things, and its outputs include RSS feeds. You want a feed of updates from 10 key medical sites whenever any news about a particular issue is written about? Blekko can do that. You want to track a collection of blogs that cover a particular topic and get a ping when they write about one company, one concept or one keyword across all their blogs? No problem. It's great.

A custom search engine creation service with RSS feeds. That deserves a place on this list.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It just launched. When it launched, I said it was too beautiful to live long, but its CEO has been around the block many times and tells me he knows what he's doing.

Facebook
All RWW coverage of Facebook

Facebook's syndicated updates from friends, families and media organizations are the single most important way that hundreds of millions of people around the world relate to the power of the feed. The company tried to do a lot this year, but it's hard to know how drastic the users' experience will end up being. None the less: Facebook Places alone represents the introduction of a radical new type of knowledge into many peoples' lives (where the people you know are right now) - and it's coming to them by feed.

OStatus
Selected coverage: Run Your Own Twitter Clone: Status.net Launches Public Beta

When you hear about Diaspora, when you hear about Status.net, OStatus is what's under the hood. This open-source amalgamation of communication technology standards is like Twitter for networks that are disconnected, but interoperable. "People on Different Networks Following Each Other" is the OStatus slogan.

What does it mean? Interoperability means social networks compete on features, not control over your friends, because switching costs are removed. You lose nothing if you switch networks.

OStatus didn't take off like a Tweeting rocket ship this year, but it saw some continued growth, development and attention. Someday, maybe someday, the asynchronous micro-messaging that so many of us find so much value in will break out of the clutches of one single company (wonderful as you are, dear Twitter) and become a real communication platform like the telephone. That's probably as crazy as imagining a time when AT&T customers can call Verizon customers though, isn't it?

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet.

Dapper
Selected coverage: How Yahoo's Latest Acquisition Stole & Broke My Heart

Point and click on almost any field on almost any Web page and Dapper will give you an RSS URL you can use to subscribe to updates from that field, if and when the content there changes. It sounds like a simple thing, but it's incredibly powerful.

Dapper has been one of my favorite services for years and was joined by Needlebase in the DIY data extraction world that has so much potential.

In recent years, the devil bought Dapper's soul, turning it into a semantic advertising platform in order to monetize its core technology. Then Yahoo bought the whole company this Fall, which will allow the core feed-extraction tool to remain open, at least for a while longer. To use this incredible tool, you've just got to sneak in through the back door at Open.Dapper.net.

Not Dead Yet Factor: It's not dead yet. Maybe more alive than it's been in years, in fact.

Honorable mentions:

Yahoo Pipes - definitely not dead yet. The company released an experimental 2.0 version of this wonderful spaghetti pipes tool for RSS magic this year, but few people noticed and the company itself says its products aren't production ready. YSQL is a better bet, if you're comfortable working with that. If not, well - Pipes isn't dead yet.

Twitter - One of these days! Annotations! Meaningful location as a platform! This year had high hopes for Twitter's technology. The year ended up being about better up-time, a prettier Web site and the company's nascent ad sales efforts.

Ogre translates spatial files into GeoJSON using a command line tool for use in JavaScript Web apps. Awesome. Some people are using this for sure, to set proprietary geodata free. Too few people, though.

OneSpot - This content recommendation engine does a lot of things, but my favorite thing it does is look at any set of feeds you give it and then suggest thousands of other feeds it believes are related. It's easy to curate a few hundred top blogs in any field that way.

That's our list - how does it compare to yours? What's coming down the line that you think might shake things up in RSS and syndication in 2011? Let us know in comments.

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

On the far left we've got services that facilitate human-to-human communication, like Twitter itself, Instant Messaging and a new service called Olark (our review). Olark integrates with your existing instant messenger client to facilitate real-time chat with visitors to a particular page of your website. It's document-centric (another potential axis of analysis) but the value proposition is in direct communication between people.

On the near left we've got services that derive their value through human-to-machine/object-to-human communication. These forms of communication are particularly mediated by technology (though obviously in absolute terms even the human to human examples here are). For example: Aardvark is a service that cross references what you say you know about, what others say you know about, your network of contact networks, everyone's present availability and past performance in answering questions from Aardvark users. The result is a "real-time web of people" accessible through a very intelligent bot that delivers any question you have to the most qualified person socially near you who is available at that moment.

On the near right you'll find machine-to-human systems. These are like real-time robots who do work for you and then notify you immediately when something you're interested in has changed. Notify.me is a white-label real-time alert service (among other things) where the value comes from the machine communicating things to you.

On the far right are machine-to-machine systems. The two examples we have here are entirely theoretical so far. Both come from PubSubhubbub co-creator Brad Fitzpatrick of Google. Fitzpatrick says he imagines a future where PubSubhubbub or some other effective real-time communications protocol is used by services that want to subscribe to stay synced with our social media profiles made available through the WebFinger protocol. He also envisions a future where the entire web may be Hubbub-enabled, allowing Google to simply subscribe for updates whenever they're available from webpages, instead of going out and pro-actively spidering the entire web to index it.

These kinds of machine-to-machine communication can have all kinds of benefits. Fitzpatrick told us, for example, that the early implementation of Pubsubhubbub for shared items in Google Reader helped aggregation services get updates far more efficiently than the old "is there anything new yet?" method of periodic polling. He says, "When we enabled Hubbub [real-time] subscription to Blogger and Google Reader shared items, FriendFeed's traffic to us dropped 85% and latency changed from minutes to seconds."

My theory is that the technologies on the left have traditionally not been a big focus of development but are in this current era being heavily built out. On the right side, however, the financial world and others have traditionally put a lot of resources into machine-to-machine communication - but in this real-time web era, this kind of communication is just beginning to be developed in a lightweight capacity.

We hope you'll join us on Thursday to talk about questions like these. Either in person in Mountain View, California (register now before prices jump on the day of the event!) or right here on ReadWriteWeb, where we'll be live-streaming selected sessions compliments of Justin.tv.

Finally, check out our fabulous event sponsors below. Where would you put them on this continuum? There's all kinds of different ways to discuss and think about the real-time web, and the more clearly we can think about it the better we'll be able to take action and build the web of the future with this important new part of it well-utilized.

We'll see you on Thursday!

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.

Making websites real time is the hottest trend online this season. From Facebook to Google, Twitter, Digg and countless little innovative startups, it seems like everyone is either doing it or talking about it. (See our Introduction to the Real Time Web for background.) Might some sites choose to use an outside service that specializes in real time infrastructure, instead of building their own in-house? That's what Notify.me is betting on.

Notify.me is a San Diego based startup made of tech industry veterans, some working on the company on the side, others full time. The company has taken no funding, has no revenue and no one working there is being paid. The executive team is made up of engineers from companies like MP3.com, the Health Care division of SAIC, Napster, DekiWiki and Yahoo. It's a pretty hot crew to get together with no pay to take a long shot at productizing a technology like real time.

This isn't just another fly-by-night "instant alerts" service, though casual observers may have thought as much over the several months that the free consumer version of Notify.me has been available. (We count ourselves among those casual observers, in fact!)

Using the free consumer service, anyone can set up alerts to be delivered by IM, SMS, email or to an Adobe AIR app whenever an RSS feed updates. That's nice and hopefully Notify.me's service will work better than the alternatives do these days, but RSS to IM/SMS alerts are nothing new.

Where it gets really exciting is in the two APIs the company is working on.

What's New: The APIs

A REST API is available for publishers now and C# and Perl libraries should be available in two weeks. That API allows publishers to define particular events on their site and then offer real time alerts to readers when those events occur. You might want real time notification when someone leaves a comment in reply to yours, or when a site publishes news concerning a particular topic, or when a new event listing is published so you can buy tickets right away. The possibilities are endless and fun to imagine.

The second API in the works is an Actionscript and XMPP Client API that allows developers to build interfaces for audiences to consume real time alerts through. That API has specs in draft form now but the company says it expects little change to occur before a final release.

What does that mean? It means you could add real time notification consumption to apps on the web, desktop or iPhone (using the new Push Notification Service in the next iPhone OS release).

Put those two APIs together and you've got publishing and reading apps going in real time. Hello real time web!

Can They Sell Real Time to Businesses?

The Notify.me team has immediate designs on business customers. Talks have begun with companies in the medical, financial and software fields. Doctors could use real time updates to track patient updates, including allergies and drug conflicts as they are discovered, prior to prescribing medication. Medical practices could push lab results to physicians instead of waiting on a chart pull request.

Would medical software companies use a hosted 3rd party API as real time infrastructure? Notify.me says they have consulted with HIPAA experts who believe that as long as the company transmits notification of an event and not personal medical information, they should be legally compliant.

Figuring out rules for determining what kinds of information gets delivered will be one challenge that Notify.me will have to tackle with customers. As Sameer Patel, another entrepreneur in this market, points out: "What's absolutely necessary in the B2B space though is smart aggregation before push comes into play. Failing this, its going to be a fire hose that will quickly alienate the end user."

Gnip is another service offering similar kinds of functionality, but for different markets. Gnip head Eric Marcoullier had this to say about Notify.me's B2B prospects:

"Good for them. Further validation that slinging realtime data around has value. I bet they'll find good money there. We've even considered some of those use cases in the past, but have shied away because of the liability that's associated. The Gnip team works really hard to make sure that the platform is always running (with 99 point nine something uptime since launch) but if data gets held up for an hour, nobody's life depends on it. I'm psyched someone else is diving into the mission-critical data delivery while we work on business-critical data."

Indeed, reliable scalability will be Notify.me's biggest challenge. That's something the company has focused on since the start. Proving their case and building a name for themselves as a popular consumer notification service is a business strategy that quite a few other Web 2.0 type startups have done well with.

Can that strategy work with real time notifications, though? We suspect that business customers may be more interested in integrating real time functionality than all but a few power user consumers will be, so if you like the consumer service of Notify.me you'd better use it now, before the more viable business market takes precedence in the company's day to day decision making to the detriment of free accounts.

In the meantime, we expect that someone will succeed in bringing a real time service layer to the websites we use and work with every day. Real time is just too compelling for the paradigm to go back into the genie's bottle. It could be Notify.me that finds that success.