In Netvibes. 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. In an unembargoed presentation sent to press this morning, Netvibes said that it would be adding support to its next version for both Pubsubhubbub and RSS Cloud protocols. When those technologies are used to tell Netvibes that new items are available, the items will be pushed automatically to the browsers of subscribers - with no browser refresh required. XMPP. What is it ? Real-time web protocol PubSubHubbub's co-creator Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google, gave a talk at Facebook headquarters today about how the new information delivery system works and how Facebook can support it.
He's published his deck on his blog and we've embedded it below as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day. If you're interested in making your content available in real time or more efficiently using real-time content syndicated from elsewhere, this presentation is a must-see. Each day leading up to the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th we're highlighting one important article written by someone from outside our staff on the topic of the real-time web. Slatkin's 61-slide deck makes a great introduction to both the technical and strategic aspects of the PubSubHubbub protocol. Slatkin starts out by explaining the value propositions of real-time data delivery, with an emphasis on social networking because he's speaking at Facebook. What is PubSubHubbub? In Google Reader. 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. Subscribers get the latest content on their favorite feeds in near real time (sans repeated links), while publishers let the hub handle the subscription load. This distributed model allows publishers and subscribers to reduce the number of actions required to serve up feeds and is what Anil Dash eloquently describes as the Pushbutton Web.
This latest Reader effort is a 20% Google project of Mihai Parparita, Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick.