ReadWriteWeb

Push me, pull me, real time web: we've now got enough options available to us when choosing how to consume our favorite web content that we may as well start mixing things up a bit, no?

Push delivery technology company Superfeedr today released a new Chrome browser plug-in called Msgboy. (The first 200 people to use this link can get it.) The plug-in accesses your browser's history and uses it to make a big list of web pages you like and feeds you're subscribed to. Then it uses Superfeeder's XMPP and Websockets technology to push new updates from those sources to your browser, in the form of a Chrome Notification. Click the plus and minus buttons in the pop-up and you can quickly train it to know what kind of notifications you want or don't want to see. I've been using it this morning and like it a lot. There are a lot of feeds I've subscribed to that I don't remember to check very often anymore; now they are in the corner of my screen all day.

All the time on the Web, things are happening. Comments are being left, blogs updated, messages sent, tweets tweeted, and so on. If you're an information junkie, then you don't want to know later, you want to know now.

One way of knowing now is setting up a mobile notification app, like Boxcar, to let you know the moment everything happens when you're out and about. But what about if you're sitting at your desk? For that, the company has just released a desktop version of Boxcar for the Mac and the app is soon on its way to a number of other devices and platforms.

Mobile services platform provider Urban Airship launched a new service for Android developers at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida this week. The service, Embedded Push for Android, is an end-to-end push notification system, an alternative to Google's default solution, C2DM.

The benefits of the new solution include features like the ability to configure "quiet time," plus Quality of Service guarantees and return receipts. The push system is also more battery-friendly than Google's solution, says Urban Airship.

Twitter announced a new version of its app for Android today, which it says is now one of the top 5 most popular ways to access Twitter. The new version is easier to read updates on without having an account, has more granular search options and interface more like the one iPhone owners see.

What may be most notable though is the abscence of new features. Twitter for iPhone got push notifications for @ mentions and direct messages a whole three months ago. Twitter said at the time that it hoped to add push to Android soon, but it's not in this new version. Also missing: any ability to log in to multiple accounts. Other power-user features may or may not come to Twitter's official app someday, but the abscence of official push notifications is a real loss.

Want to know instantly who's talking about you on Twitter? Well, now you can get real-time notifications on your phone, as Twitter has just announced push notifications for @mentions.

Up til now, push notifications for Twitter on the iPhone have been only available via other apps, such as Boxcar.

The default setting for notifications is for accounts that you follow, but you can adjust it for all mentions. Smartphone battery beware. But that distinction is important, as it gives users better control over their notifications.

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:

There is a fundamental problem that Internet startups face when they begin to grow: scalability. It is imperative to be able to not only handle large flows of data from usage, but also to deploy changes and upgrades to your software across multiple servers as fast as possible. Twitter faces this challenge every day as its farm of servers grows, and today the San Francisco-based company is open sourcing its solution to the deployment problem for all to use.

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.

Google just announced that its users can now get their Gmail messages pushed directly to their iPhones and Windows Mobile phones. Push Gmail is now a feature of Google Sync. Google started to support the iPhone, iPod touch, and Windows Mobile in Google Sync earlier this year, but at that time, it could only push calendar and address book changes directly to these phones. Finally, Gmail users will now be able to see messages in the iPhone's mail app without having to regularly ping Google's servers for updates.

Notifications combines push notifications for Twitter, email, and any RSS feed into one iPhone app. While we have tested quite a few push notification apps in the past, including some great apps like Boxcar and GPush, none of these offer the flexibility of Notifications. While it still has a few flaws and takes a while to set up, Notifications offers a number of features other apps don't offer, including the ability to get notified of new tweets with specific keywords. The app costs $2 and is available in the App Store now.