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

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles . Sponsor Going Beyond Text While Mayer expects the search market to continue to grow, she also thinks that a lot of additional growth can come from introducing new ways of searching the web. Translation and personalization are also a major issue for Google. Asked about SearchWiki - which Arrington considers a failure - Mayer said that Google wants to morph the user experience a bit, but didn't go into any details. Regarding the Google Goggles and Google's current dependency on text to power its search, Mayer noted that the application looks at more than just location data and image recognition algorithms. Speech recognition, however, is still easier to do for Google than image recognition. Mobile Search Talking about mobile searches, Mayer said that the number of mobile searches doubled last year. Mobile searches make up slightly more than 5% of all of the search queries that Google processes. Chrome and the ChromeOS With regards to Chrome, Mayer noted that Google wants to focus on the user experience with features like the new tab page. She described the ChromeOS as an anti-operating system. In total, Google sees "tens of millions of Chrome users," though characteristically, Mayer did not go into any details. Google and the News Media Google wants to increase users' engagement with news. According to Mayer, if we were to reinvent the news today, it would look very different from what we know today. She cited Google Living Stories as an experiment that tries to reinvent the news for the 21st century. Currently, readers tend to come to articles from Google and only read one article. To increase engagement, Mayer wants to create more personalized services. In addition, she also thinks that newspapers can do a better job at keeping users on their sites. Why, for example, do most sites not offer links to related articles? The Future of News Mayer's vision of the future of news is a personalized stream of news that is portable. The personalization would take into account stories that your friends read, location and a knowledge of the topics a user is interested in. Asked about Rupert Murdoch, Mayer noted that Google partnered with MySpace to aggregate real-time status updates from MySpace users. She hopes that Murdoch will not pull all of his content out of Google. Surprisingly, Mayer didn't completely deny that Google would be willing to pay publishers for their content. Music Search Mayer said that she was happy with Google Music as a start, especially because it includes song lyrics. Mayer sidestepped any discussion about the future of Google's Music search feature. Google and Social Networks Asked about Google Social Search, Mayer noted that search can help social networks by helping users to find experts in their circle of friends. Mayer noted that users are more likely to trust their friends when it comes to certain queries (snow conditions, for example). The perfect search engine would also be able to crawl private updates that a user is credentialed to see. Mayer also noted that Google might be able to help to create an authority ranking system for real-time updates from services like Twitter and Facebook. Google Wave Arrington asked Mayer if users need to be trained better to understand Wave or if Google plans to tweak the experience. Permanent URLs are one of the features that Google plans to add. The fact that Google Wave doesn't have critical mass yet is also hindering the experience. Some teams at Google are currently using Wave for their internal communication. Mayer did not make any announcement regarding the future of Wave. Discuss

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Marissa Mayer Talks About Wave, Music Search and the Future of News

Google held a major search product event today and among many incredible new products and features displayed was real-time search. Fresh search results pushed live to the search results page, with a pause button above that section of the page. Results are coming in from freshly published web pages, Tweets, MySpace updates and shockingly, Facebook public profiles. Check out the demo video below. Sponsor Want to see real-time results for any query right now? Go to http://google.com/trends and click on any of the hot topics on that page. Replace the search query in that page's URL with a new search term and if real time results are available, you'll be able to see them. This looks a lot like what Collecta offers with its XMPP API. This option should be baked into Google.com's main search results pages soon. The company also says that technologies like personalization and localization will be baked into real-time search in the future. Discuss

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Google Real-Time Search Live Now (Video, Links)

We've been keeping an eye on super-simple feed reader Lazyfeed for about six months now. Cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng wrote us today to let us know about some exciting changes users will see tomorrow morning when the startup launches Lazyfeed Squared, the second version of the product. "In our previous version," he said, "users had to click on updated topics to see what's inside. That is not lazy. And it wasn't fun enough. With the new version, it's not just the topics that update - each topic has its own live updates which show the latest headlines along with images." Sponsor In days of yore , users would type in a tag or single-word search term, and LazyFeed would return videos, photos and blog posts tagged with that term. Users were then prompted to add that term as a topic, which essentially meant the search was saved. The UI looked like a typical feed reader: In September, the site announced support for both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, making the product even quicker, in some cases as fast as an IM client. Lazyfeed Squared retains the real-time capabilities of the previous version, but it's a more passive experience, like watching television. "It delivers updates (updated content) of updates(updated topics)," said Gahng. "You don't even need to flick a finger to see what's up with your topics. You can just add stuff and watch live content flow in." Lazyfeed has also eliminated the need to sign up to use the service. "This will make it much easier to recommend Lazyfeed to your friends," said Gahng. "We think this will greatly make Lazyfeed more approachable for first-time users." Discuss

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Lazyfeed Gets Even Lazier: Users Get TV-Like Feed Reader

The rapid growth of the mobile web is a force that could be disruptive to Google, a company that built its search engine for a desktop-based world. On the handheld, all bets are off. Anyone with an innovative concept for improving mobile search could gain ground, possibly even overtaking Google as the top search provider for mobile devices. But don't worry - Google hasn't been ignoring this trend. The company has been busy prepping various initiatives designed to get people googling from their mobile phones. From scannable barcodes to an innovative visual search app that lets you perform searches by taking photos, Google is slowly revealing how they plan to dominate search in the real world too. Sponsor Google Does Barcodes (Again) Google hasn't given up on barcode scanning just yet. Although a failed Print Ad program featuring barcodes for newspapers was shut down at the beginning of the year, that hasn't stopped the company from giving barcodes another go. This time, the venue isn't the old-fashioned newspaper, but local businesses. Through Google's Favorite Places program, over 100,000 of the U.S.'s most popular local businesses will receive stickers sporting Google's logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading "we're a favorite place on Google." Business owners can post these decals to their store windows to show off their respectability and popularity - and you can bet many will. Customers scanning the barcode will be taken to that store's "place page" which reveals various details about the business including hours of operation, reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers, brands carried, menus (if a restaurant), and even mobile coupons if available. In addition, users can "star" (rate) the establishment and submit their own review, if desired, turning Google Local Businesses into a Yelp -like user-generated reviews service. While this initiative has a better chance for success in introducing barcode-scanning to the U.S. market than the Print Ad program did, there's still going to be some confusion on the part of consumers as to how to get started. Google notes in their Favorite Places FAQ that many modern smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, and other Android devices offer barcode scanning applications, but no links or suggestions are provided. This leaves consumers with having to figure it out on their own. In addition, feature phone owners whose more basic devices include cameras may also wonder if there is software for their phones, too. In some cases there is , but the less tech-savvy mainstream user base has no way of discovering that without taking the time to do some research on the topic. Perhaps Google should have introduced a cross-platform barcode-scanning application of their own? If they had, it could have definitely helped push the technology adoption forward. It's almost surprising that they haven't yet done so especially considering that their latest search rival, Microsoft, has. With Microsoft Tag , for example, you can create your own barcode-like "Tag images" as well as download mobile Tag-reading software. Mobile Coupons As mentioned above, the Favorite Places' barcodes will link to pages that support mobile coupons, assuming the business chooses to offer them. However, these coupons aren't limited to "favorite" businesses - any business listed on Google Local Search can use this feature. Announced late last month , Google introduced the mobile coupon feature to their Google Local Business Center program which lets any company offer coupons that consumers can access right from their mobile phone. At checkout, the shopper just needs to show the coupon on their mobile's screen to receive the discount. Visual Search via Mobile Photos Google Visual Search is an upcoming technology still in development which was revealed on CNBC's " Inside the Mind of Google " segment on December 3rd. This innovative mobile application aims to provide an even more intuitive way for interacting with the real world via your mobile phone. With Visual Search, users with phones running Google's own mobile operating system "Android" will be able to take a photo of their location and use that to trigger a Google search. In order for this to work, advanced algorithms have to match the photo with those stored in a massive database on the backend. Initially, this service could be used to provide information about various landmarks, businesses, or other notable locales, but really the possibilities are endless. Eventually, the same technology that recognizes landmarks could recognize other objects, too, like products on store shelves, billboard ads, or street intersections. It could even

At Microsoft's San Francisco campus this morning, a room full of tech journalists and entrepreneurs were treated to their first glimpse of Bing Maps Beta . When Microsoft first spoke about it's efforts towards geospatial projects, many were skeptical; nevertheless, it looks like the search giant has managed to deliver. Sponsor Bing Maps is built on Silverlight and offers 3 different viewing dimensions. The most interesting, the 3D Streetside (street view), offers seamless stitched imagery for 100 major cities with more planned in the coming months. As for bird's eye view, the mapping service has data on about 95% of the US. And finally, the aerial perspective is internationally available. Photosynths Microsoft has already begun incorporating Photosynths or user generated data onto its maps. These Photosynths can be viewed from the Streetside perspective and offer users a chance to drill down for more information on particular points of interest. There are already Synths mapped within New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. App Gallery Microsoft has already seeded the beginnings of its map app gallery. Some of the maps featured by the company include: 1. Twitter: Users can get real-time event updates and tweets from the originating location. 2. Local Lens: Microsoft indexes local blogs to form hyperlocal routes and event feeds. Says the company, "It's an entirely new way to consume local crowdsourced information - something 72% of customers do routinely on the web." 3. What's Nearby: If you already know where your meeting is, Bing Maps offers users a chance to search nearby restaurants and services. The company combines public data from sites like Yelp and Citysearch and allows users to gain rich data for their location-based searches. To check out the service for yourself visit bing.com/maps/explore . Discuss

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Bing Maps Beta Launches with Twitter Integration and Better Streetview

According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog , the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post. Sponsor The New Image Results To be clear, this update is for universal image results only - not Google Image search itself. "Universal" results refer to the search results you receive when doing a traditional search on www.google.com. Introduced back in 2007, the term refers to the combined search results from multiple verticals, including image search, news, video search, and the other specialized engines linked from the top of Google's homepage. With universal search, you only have to refer to one set search results page to see all the relevant information on a particular topic. The page serves as the jumping off point for whatever knowledge you're after - whether that's a photo, a video, the latest news, or just good ol' fashioned information. The updated image search results represent a minor change to Google's interface and one that many mainstream users may not have even noticed. But every little tweak that Google makes is only done after extensive testing. In this case, the update allows for one more image to appear in the universal image results box. One image may not seem like a major improvement, but it could mean the difference between a user clicking through to see more or abandoning their Google Search altogether. (You would be surprised how quickly some users give up on a non-productive search. Forget refining queries, they just go elsewhere or stop their search entirely!). Google Announcement's Timing Aimed to Deflate Interest in Bing It's also notable that Google is announcing this change around the same time as Microsoft plans to make another announcement regarding updated features for Bing , the company's new search engine. Since its launch earlier this year, the Bing Search Team at Microsoft has been busy rolling out updates that have included things like a revamped mobile search , improvements to maps , integration with math engine Wolfram Alpha , Twitter integration , and a new visual search interface . As most of these announcements were made, Google would make an announcement of their own - for example, how they were planning on adding Twitter to their results, too . And when Bing announced Visual Search, Google posted to their blog about a Google Experiment called "Fast Flip" which lets you visually peruse print articles online. There's no doubt that the timing of this latest, albeit minor, news about Image Search improvements has to do at least partially with the upcoming Bing announcement. Clearly, we have entered a new era of "search wars." As angel investor Ron Conway noted earlier this fall at the TC50 conference, this time war is a good thing: "I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers." Disclosure: Sarah Perez also freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10. She is not a Microsoft employee. Discuss

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Google Rolls Out New Format for Image Results