ReadWriteWeb

SPDY is a hypertext protocol developed by Google as an alternative/compliment to HTTP. It improves the performance of modern websites by adding a few features such as multiplexed requests, prioritized requests and compressed headers. You can read our previous coverage for more information.

How can you take advantage of SPDY on your own site? So far, only Google Chrome (versions 6.0 and up) support SPDY, so you'll need to support two protocols: SPDY for Chrrome, and HTTP for everything else. You'll also need to automatically switch between the two protocols depending on the browser your visitors are using.

Strangeloop Site Optimizer now does just that.

The JSON Activity Streams spec has hit a 1.0 release. Activity Streams provides a common protocol for creating and parsing activity streams. The ATOM version was already at 1.0.

The Facebook Wall is probably the most famous example of an activity stream, but just about any application could generate a stream of information in this format. Using a common format for activity streams could enable applications to communicate with one another, and presents new opportunities for information aggregation.

STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.

Wiredset created the protocol to deal with the challenges it faced when building the Trendr API. The team needed a way to offer extremely high-volume API calls with low latency, deliver the results in real-time at scale, and do so through a RESTful interface.

Google has just announced that it is working on a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the Web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows Web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype Web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.