Boxcar
Boxcar made its biggest waves back when the iPhone still didn’t offer push notifications and before the Twitter app got notifications of its own. Since then, however, Boxcar has come out with a series of updates that make it our go-to notification app for the iPhone. It’s latest update brought support for Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, Google Voice, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit and more. Sure, you can still use the individual notifications from each app, but Boxcar shows how we’d really like our real-time notifications to be handled – all in one location with customizable settings.
Over the past year, I’ve used Boxcar to get notifications about important emails, turned Twitter into an alternative for SMS and kept up with moderator message from Reddit. Beyond that, you can be alerted to all sorts of things while you’re out and about and that’s how we like our real-time Web – both fast and mobile.
Disqus
In discussing what would make our top 10 list, we knew that real-time commenting had to be on there and it was between Disqus, echo and Livefyre. All are great, full-featured commenting systems, but we had to go with the one we just implemented on ReadWriteWeb this past week. Real-time commenting systems like Disqus add an entire other layer on top of the Web, allowing users once identified simply as “readers” to become involved and interact with each other and with the authors. The entire idea of Web 2.0 (and ReadWriteWeb) is the dissolution of this boundary and systems like Disqus go a long way in that effort.
Is It Really, Really Real Time?
As 2011 goes on, we’re sure to see even more sites “go real-time” until it gets to the point that it has with social. The press release will hit the wire, we’ll all look up and mumble “Oh, I see so-and-so has decided to joint the party.” Pages without real-time elements feel inanimate and dead and that’s just not what the Web is about anymore. The Web is in constant motion as are all of its parts.
With so much of the Web moving in this direction, we’re sure we’ve missed something here, so we’d love it if you would jump in on our real-time commenting system below and let us know – what would you have put on your top 10 list of real-time products for 2010?
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