Facebook Places: LBS Goes Mainstream
For many of the techie elites and early adopters, 2010 started off with all sorts of talk about the “Location-Based Service Wars”. Things seemed to be heating up with location-based check-in apps like Gowalla, Foursquare, MyTown and brightkite. LBS apps are inherently real-time by nature, connecting users with each other by showing who is checked in where, identifying trending locations, and allowing users to communicate with each other – all in real time.
Facebook introduced its “Places” product this summer, bringing all the real-time, location-based fun to the general public. Suddenly, the idea that where you were could be broadcast out to your friends became an idea that was accessible to the smartphone-owning yet not-so-early adopter.
PubSubHubbub Proliferates
PubSubHubbub (PuSH)showed up in no fewer than three of our top 10 lists for 2009 and it’s showing up again this year because of its continued role in growing the real-time Web. When Marshall Kirkpatrick listed it as a top 10 real-time technology last year, he noted that the technology, which delivers updated content in real-time from a central hub to all subscribers, was being used by a number of sites such as FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal and Google Alerts. This year, that trend has continued, as PuSH has spread futher around the Web. In March, WordPress’ 10.5 million blogs became PuSH-enabled, meaning that one of the most popular self-publishing platforms out there suddenly became real-time enabled. A month before that, we had broken the news that Google Reader began consuming PuSH feeds in real time. We expect to see this trend continue and watch as PuSH brings real-time updating to even more of the Web.
Next: Randomized Chatting & Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Favorite New RSS Feed Tool
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