RSS feeds, while extremely useful, can't really provide a real-time experience as your feed reader or other RSS enabled program has to actually ping the feed at regular intervals. Instead of getting information pushed out to, you have to actively pull the information in - and, for practical reasons, most feed readers like Google Reader only poll feeds a few times an hour.

Thanks to protocols like XMPP and SUP, however, it is becoming easier for developers to pass along updates to their users almost immediately.

Notifixious

Notifixious's Superfeeder wants to bridge the world of RSS feeds and the real-time web.

Notifixious's mission is to provide (almost) real-time updates when a blog or news organization posts a new story. You simply tell Notifixious which sites to monitor and whenever it finds an update, it will send out an alert to your IM account or mobile phone.

Currently, Notifixious can only get 'real' real-time updates through XMPP from Identica, Seesmic, LiveJournal, and Sixapart's TypePad and Vox blogging communities. Notifixious also monitors public ping servers, though these can be unreliable at times.

FriendFeed Real-Time

We are big fans of FriendFeed here at ReadWriteWeb (you can find - and join - our FF room here). One of the neatest features of FriendFeed is its ability to show you a real-time stream of your friend's updates. You can actually put those real-time updates into a browser sidebar if you use Firefox. Of course, this stream, like a lot of real-time applications, can often move faster than you can read if you follow a lot of FriendFeed users.

Monitter

The search function that Twitter acquired from Summize is probably the most commonly used real-time search engine on the Internet right now. Sadly, the results page doesn't automatically update as new updates come in.

A service that does just that is Monitter (our review). Monitter lets you simultaneously search for three keywords and it automatically updates whenever a new post with the keyword appears.

The Real-Time Web at Work: Google Docs, Zoho, MindMeister

Of course, the real-time web isn't just about consuming information - Google Docs, Zoho, MindMeister and many others allow you to collaborate and edit documents with your colleagues in real-time. As you make changes to the document, those changes will immediately be reflected on your fellow users' screens as well.

Starting Next Week: Your Facebook Homepage

You can't actually use this today, but earlier this week, Facebook announced that it will enable real-time updates of its users' news feeds next week. Currently, Facebook only updates the feed a few times per hour. Once this new version of the news feed goes live, it will probably be one of the largest implementations of real-time status updates on the Internet.

CC-licensed logo image used courtesy of Flickr user RBerteig

Clearly, this new interface, dubbed the MenuTab by Zoho, was inspired by Microsoft's Ribbon interface, which is slowly becoming the standard interface paradigm for Microsoft applications. Zoho smartly keeps the most often used functions like undo/redo, copy, cut, paste, and save outside of these tabs so that they are always available (something MS Office also does thanks to the Quick Access Toolbar). In our tests, the MenuTab worked just as advertised, and if you are comfortable with the MS Office 2007 interface, you will feel right at home in the new Zoho Writer.

Zoho plans to make the MenuTab the default interface for all of its productivity applications in the near future.

New Features

Zoho also added a few new features to Writer. Among these are improved auto-insert fields for dates and page numbers in the header and footer, a word and character count in the status bar, a LaTeX editor, and the ability to change your page layout to landscape mode. Collaborative editing is probably the most important new feature (and a necessary one, given that Google Docs has been doing this for a long time), but as Rafe Needleman points out, it's too easy to overwrite another user's edits.