ReadWriteWeb

The real-time web was hot this year and it's likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We've tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Hot new RSS reader LazyFeed just announced that it intends to implement support for RSSCloud, the real-time element in RSS that WordPress turned on for millions of blogs today. Perhaps already more hip to the real time web than any other RSS aggregator on the market, LazyFeed is a very logical place to see RSSCloud in action.

LazyFeed is a service that tracks blog posts by topic and notifies users in real time when new posts of interest from across the web are available. You don't subscribe to RSS feeds in LazyFeed; users select topics manually or the service can suggest topics based on the interests you've already exhibited in your Twitter, Delicious or other social media account. Now the site will serve up posts from WordPress blogs in real time.

All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon. Update: Within hours another RSS reader called LazyFeed has announced that it will support RSSCloud as well.

RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. The implications of this big vote of support go beyond reading WordPress blogs; this is the kind of traction that new technologies can leverage to gain support in many different applications.