ReadWriteWeb

Last month, real-time feed service Superfeedr introduced the option to subscribe to any type of arbitrary content - such as static HTML pages, V Cards, JSON and more. This week the company announced the ability to subscribe to only fragments of HTML pages. As an example, Superfeedr explained how to subscribe to just the "current conditions" on The New York Times Weather page.

Couchpubtato brings together PubSubHubbub and CouchDB, giving you the ability to turn your feeds into real-time streams and then make any Couch database act as a subscriber endpoint.

Couchpubtato converts incoming XML RSS and ATOM feed data into JSON Activity Streams format. Here's an example:

Updated at 9:30 PM PST with comment from Google. Google posted an unlisted video to YouTube tonight showing details of a 2.0 version of its Feed API, a simple tool for displaying recent headlines from a syndicated feed on any web page. The new version will accept real-time PubSubHubbub feeds and will publish new headlines to a site visitor's browser within seconds of their being published to the feed.

This new version turns the Feed API from cool to super-cool. It's a good example of the way much of the web is likely to go in the near-term future. No more refreshing pages to see when new content is available - the real-time web comes to you live, nearly instantly as soon as it's published.

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It's almost like an ocean where there's no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it's always raining in it. The rain is the new content that's added into the ocean.

Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook.

Google is developing a system to ingest real-time content updates from any page on the web automatically, using the open PubSubHubbub Atom protocol, we reported on Wednesday.

Google already indexes a whole lot of content very quickly, will a real-time indexing system make a big difference? There are differences of opinion on the matter and we'd like to know what you think. Search analyst Danny Sullivan told us on Wednesday that he thought it could be "the next chapter" for Google. John Battelle said this morning: "In short, it's a new way for Google to get (more) real time signals. But honestly, not a huge deal. I don't think. Correct me if I'm wrong..." What do you think, readers?

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.

Last Fall we were told by Google's Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years.

Last September, Wordpress made millions of its blogs real-time with RSSCloud, but today it has taken real-time a step further

What this means, essentially, is that you no longer need to wait for your news reader to ping your blog every so often to find out if there are any updates - you'll find out in real time.

We just received confirmation from Google that Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites would appear in Google Reader. Now, however, posts from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds (including our own RSS feed) have started to appear in Google Reader almost immediately after they are published.

Starting today, the popular light blogging platform Tumblr will publish its users' feeds in real time. Tumblr will use the increasingly popular PubSubHubbub format to announce updates. Tumblr's real-time hub will be powered by Superfeedr. Thanks to today's updates, Tumblr - which has close to 2.5 million users - will now be able to send out real-time alerts to any service that supports the PubSubHubbub format.

After 18 months of negotiation, the Open Web Foundation, a group made up of 106 employees of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, some small startups and their lawyers, today released a legal document template for licensing open web technology specifications. The result could be greatly accelerated time-to-market for new technologies developed on top of these specifications and more awesomeness, sooner, for web consumers.

Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.