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.

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.

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

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:

Superfeedr, the real-time feed transformation service funded by Betaworks and Mark Cuban, announced today that it now offers real-time keyword tracking across all 2.1 million feeds that are run through its hub.

Any time your keywords of interest appear across Tumblr, Posterous, Typepad, Gowalla, Gawker, HuffingtonPost or a number of other sources subscribed to Superfeedr (including ReadWriteWeb!) you can receive real-time notification pushed to you within seconds.

If the web of the future is based on real-time data delivery, San Francisco startup Superfeedr hopes to be a big part of the technology that helps it get there. The company takes content feeds in a wide variety of traditional formats and transforms them into real-time feeds pushed to parties interested in consuming data in real-time.

Founder Julien Genestoux announced this week that Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Google-acquired open source Twitter competitor Jaiku and widely believed to be one of the smartest people in the social web, has joined the already impressive Superfeedr Board of Advisors. The team forming behind this startup indicates that it will likely do a lot more moving and shaking in the near-term future.

Location based social network Gowalla quietly released a big new feature today: real-time PubSubHubbub feeds for check-ins by people and at locations. Hello, mashups and 3rd party apps of the future!

In addition to being real-time and easy to access, Gowalla's new feeds are also marked-up with the beginnings of the widely used Activity Streams format. Put all of this together and Gowalla to Google Buzz is one obvious connection, but the possibilities are endless.

Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.

"If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.

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.

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.