ComScore , a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity. Flurry announced the partnership on the heels of its merger with Pinch Media last month. The service boasts a nearly ubiquitous presence in the mobile market and will add a host of real-time data to comScore's reports. Sponsor Flurry collects mobile application data from approximately two out of every three iPhone and Android devices. Each month, the company aggregates application usage data from over 1 billion end-user sessions across more than 50 million unique handsets from more than 200 countries. Over 10,000 developers have chosen to integrate Flurry Analytics within their applications. That's 9,700 developers more than the company started with just a year ago. Using Flurry's data, comScore will add "real-time consumption data, including frequency of use, length of use, user geographic location, new vs. repeat usage and Wi-Fi vs. carrier network usage" to its mobile application data. Flurry provides a variety of information including what types of applications users are most likely to continue using over time and return to frequently, as shown in the following graphic. This data can then be used by companies to lure potential advertisers or by advertisers looking for potential targets. In a market that's only going to see growth, some, like Om Malik, are already predicting Flurry's acquisition by a big-time player in the near future. Analytics remains hot, as evidenced further by this morning's news of a $27.5 million investment in comScore-competitor Quantcast by Cisco and Polaris Ventures . Discuss

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ComScore Ups the Ante in Mobile Analytics

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. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Pubsubhubbub Pubsubhubbub , created as a 20% project by Googlers Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick, is described as "a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." It delivers updated content in real-time from a pinged hub server out to all subscribers that have requested updates. Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook's FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication. Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it . RSSCloud RSSCloud is a technology that's been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience. RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn't deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress . The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe , which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall. Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web's leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management. Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we'd be fools to not watch what he's doing. Facebook Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal. Google Real-Time Search Honorable Mentions Echo - real-time comment aggregation Evri - real-time semantic news tracker Lazyfeed - topical discovery engine Netvibes - now probably the most popular real-time consuming feed reader in the world Just this week the Big G showed of its new real-time search feature . It kills what Bing and Yahoo are doing. It's simple but elegant and effective. For certain search queries, real time web pages, Twitter updates, Facebook content, MySpace updates and more will appear in a subtle, streaming box in your results page, with a pause button. It's not live on the public site yet, it's just a demo, but it's going to be very, very big next year. Big enough that it belongs on the list this year just for being demoed. Twitter search Whether you're watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme - millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages. Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site's new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important - in ways that could change our day-to-day lives. Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10 Superfeedr Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today . Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now. Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year. Tornado This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year. Breaking News Online's iPhone App Breaking News Online is an international news organization founded by now 19 year old Netherlands native Michael van Poppel. Van Poppel somehow sold a video of Ossama Bin Laden to Reuters two years ago and has since built up the fastest, smallest news organization on the planet. The American Red Cross watches BNO closely for notices of new natural disasters. MSNBC paid what have been a hefty sum for control over the Breaking News Online Twitter account this month, but the organization's iPhone app lives on in the hands of the original organization. It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year. Aardvark Aardvark is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." It's got some heavy engineering behind it and this author uses it almost every day. Google is reportedly in the process of trying to buy it. Cliqset We love a good technical standard and stream reader startup Cliqset is blazing new trails with its new real-time ActivityStreams feed normalization API . The API means activities from 70 different social services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. This is the stuff that distributed, interoperable platforms are built on, where small innovators have access to economies of scale. Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time! Discuss

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Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series , below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009. You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year. Sponsor This is the fifth in our series on top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Top 10 International Web Products of 2009 Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users . A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change. Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter. Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again. Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking. PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud ) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on. Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web. Tweetdeck (and Seesmic ) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit , but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web. Honorable Mentions: Feedly Twingly Twitterfeed Public Radio Tuner Regator Collected.info Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn't stop and the company's movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008's list. ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset . The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have. Discuss

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

Sysomos just launched the next version of Heartbeat, the company's social media monitoring tool. Highlights of Heartbeat 2.0 include a redesigned user interface and Facebook integration. Sysomos' customers can now monitor public conversations on Facebook and manage their Facebook Pages right from within Heartbeat. The Facebook integration tracks user activity, top keywords and top fans on Facebook pages. Sponsor Focus on Social Media Workflow Heartbeat does not restrict the number of users per account. This is a good thing, given that one of Heartbeat's best features is its ability to assign tasks and follow-ups to other team members. Sysomos calls this the 'engagement stream' and while Heartbeat's ability to monitor social media streams is impressive, most of the workflow in an enterprise setting happens through these engagement streams. Facebook Integration As Sysomos's Nilesh Bansal told us earlier today, the company's customers really wanted to manage their Facebook accounts through Heartbeat. Even though it takes a bit to set up - and even though Facebook still doesn't make a lot of its data public - the integration actually turns out to be quite interesting and gives users a chance to manage their social media accounts in one place. The Facebook integration shows a sentiment meter, as well as a tree graph with the most often used keywords in these postings. Even though Facebook doesn't offer a lot of public data yet, Bansal told us that the company tries to use whatever data it can get. It is important to note that Heartbeat is not just a Twitter and Facebook tool. Sysomos also tracks blogs and forum postings. One of the most interesting aspects of Heartbeat is that it can find the most influential bloggers and Twitter users that write about your company (or competitors). Heartbeat also offers sentiment analysis and does a surprisingly good job at keeping spam tweets and blogs out of its index. MAP: Social Media Analytics Sysomos also offers MAP , the company's social media analytics tool. While Hearbeat is geared towards end-users in the enterprise, MAP is a fully-featured analytics tool. With this power, however, also comes a steep learning curve. MAP also doesn't feature any of Heartbeat's social media workflow features. We took a close look at MAP in an earlier review . Sysomos also offers a very helpful chart that compares the features of MAP and Heartbeat. Pricing With an entry-level price of $500 per month, Heartbeat is clearly not a consumer product. Most of Sysomos' customers buy packages that also include access to MAP and the company creates custom quotes for these customers. We have heard, however, that Sysomos plans to offer a free or less costly product for small businesses and consumers in the future. Discuss

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Sysomos Launches Heartbeat 2.0: Enterprise-Grade Social Media Monitoring