ReadWriteWeb

The next version of popular web dashboard service Netvibes will push "near real-time" updates from feeds to the browser, a dramatic change in how the service works. Those feeds will be served up along with the standard suite of functional widgets the company has always provided.

As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

No one is getting Web aggregation quite right. That's one of the big take-aways from "Web Aggregation: What Works, What Doesn't," one of the breakout sessions at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.

We first heard about the fire hose meme several years ago in discussions about RSS. It was often used as a way to describe how information comes to you in a feed. The context has changed as real-time data becomes pervasive, and the questions about its volume persists.

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.

In an email today, Lazyfeed cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng informed us that the RSS reader is now supporting both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, allowing for real-time integration of Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and Feedburner content.

"Our internal tests show that the service has actually become significantly faster," Gahng wrote. "Now some content from as recent as several seconds ago is being notified through Lazyfeed."

Real-time computing is not new. This is the third generation of real-time:

• First generation: was done on a single processor, usually for process control in military systems.

• Second generation: within a Local Area Network, usually for a financial trading room.

• Third generation: applied across the whole Web/Internet, what we call the real-time Web.

In each generation a stack has emerged, and secure messaging has been key to that stack. The names change and the scale of the prize and challenges certainly changes, but the basic issue remains the same: delivering messages reliably and quickly. In this post, we trace the steps from the second generation to the third generation to see how the real-time Web might play out.

Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this morning that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. The service has implemented the Google-backed real-time protocol Pubsubhubbub, an Atom-centric alternative to the real-time protocol RSSCloud, which competitor WordPress turned on for millions of bloggers last week.

A fast-growing number of sites around the web are now flying the real-time banner, no longer requiring that news reading software poll them for updates several times an hour. With two of the largest blogging software providers now real-time, blogging could steal a little thunder back from immediacy-rich social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Google Reader is about to get much faster for developers. You'll be pleased to note that Reader has just adopted the PubSubHubbub protocol for shared items. This means that instead of repeatedly requesting that Reader's shared items reload from the server, the feed automatically updates via a distributed hub model. Rather than waiting on the back and forth pings of update notifications and polled Atom URLs, feed subscribers can receive both the notification and the message from a hub.