It’s not even a plug-in, but simply an automatic feature, which requires no changes from bloggers. Although, those using Advance Templates in TypePad will have to add a line of code to their atom.xml, which can be found here.

Pubsubhubbub is described as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS." This is a protocol that Google itself has adopted for shared items in Google Reader, which allows it to contribute to real-time search. Google recently provided the following presentation:

"The PubSubHubbub protocol is decentralized and free," explains Six Apart’s Nima Badiey. "No single company controls it and anybody can run a hub, ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs."

"The new TypePad PubSubHubbub hub builds on the exciting work that Brad Fitzpatrick (a Six Apart alum) and Brett Slatkin’s team at Google have done with the implementation of PubSubHubbub," Badiey says.

A lot of blogs are hosted by TypePad, so this could prove to be another big stride for the real-time web, which we hear more and more about every day. That’s why real-time search is not limited to tweets and Facebook updates. Content in general is rapidly pushed out from many different media channels all over the web. Freshness can play a big role in some kinds of queries.

Speaking of "real-time," a way to get close to real-time search using Google has been discovered by way of tweaking a URL using a time-related search option. More on this here.

Original Article: Facebook confused some users when it accidentally invited too many people to a beta test of what is being referred to as "Facebook Lite." Facebook Lite is basically a stripped down verson of the social network, which includes just status updates, likes, and comments, without things like activity stories, app stories, and embedded content.

Facebook Lite has been compared to Twitter and FriendFeed, due to its simplicity. This was probably particularly interesting to those users who experienced it, since Facebook just acquired FriendFeed, and Facebook has been known to go for more Twitter-esque approaches in some areas.

Was this a sign of Facebook to come? Not really. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook being tested for countries with low-bandwidth. Inside Facebook offers screenshots like this one:

Yes, it does look quite similar to Twitter. Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider makes a good point in that even if Facebook isn’t really going this direction, it still highlights the fact that at its core Facebook isn’t all that different from Twitter. Sure, it has some more bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, it’s main functions are very similar.

Who knows though? Twitter has a while to go before it reaches Facebook status, but if one day Twitter were to surpass Facebook in users, Facebook could conceivably go for something more like Facebook Lite. As noted, Facebook has done a variety of things that made it more like Twitter, and as you may recall, Facebook has been willing to implement radical redesigns, even when many users clearly objected.

Tornado is designed to handle thousands of connections at the same time. "As real-time updates continue to be an important feature of the social Web, developers can now leverage this powerful tool to more easily build and scale their real-time environments," a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews.

Back in March, Facebook introduced its real-time news feed, a concept that FriendFeed was also built upon. Facebook says that it hasn’t been easy to build and scale such features, so they decided to open source Tornado.

"Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain," explains Facebook’s David Recordon. "While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

In addition, Tornado provides support for templates, cookie handling and user authentication, security, localization, and static file serving.

The Tornado documentation can be found here. It provides a complete list of features and modules. Source code is here, and the technology behind it can be learned about at this post from Facebook Director of Products, Bret Taylor.

Orginal Article: If your business didn’t have enough reasons to set up a FriendFeed account before, it has a very good one now. Last week, FriendFeed launched its real-time search feature. Results for this roll in when something that fits the query is posted somewhere. Think Twitter Search, only covering a bunch of services. Do you believe FriendFeed’s real-time search is significant? Tell us what you think.

If you’re unfamiliar with FriendFeed, it allows users to add their updates from pretty much any service on the web into one stream. For instance, I could include my WebProNews articles, my SmallBusinessNewz articles, my tweets, my Facebook status updates, my Digg activity, my YouTube uploads, my Flickr uploads, etc. all in one stream where people can go or subscribe to if they want to stay up to date on all things Chris Crum.

Clearly, there is plenty of potential for such a tool from the business perspective. Look at all of the services you can add to the stream:

There are a number of real time search engines out there right now. They seem to be coming out of the woodwork in fact. Most of them cover more than just Twitter too. Twitter kind of kicked off the whole real-time search party, and tweets are definitely a big part of the picture, but there is activity going on everywhere on the web. The whole web is pretty much social now. Everyone can publish anything they want, and they have tons of sites to use to do so.

FriendFeed is about consolidating all of this. That’s what draws users to it. FriendFeed is more than a search engine obviously. It is a community. In fact, it’s more than a community. It’s a community for communities. Even as it draws from sources all over the web (as specified by the users), the conversation continues right within FriendFeed’s own interface.

People are going to FriendFeed just as if they would Facebook. That is where FriendFeed’s new real-time search stands out from other real time search engines. People are still using Google for search. If they want to find out what’s happening "right now" they probably go to Twitter.

A more accurate picture of what is going on "right now" however, can probably be found at FriendFeed. Out of the real time search engines out there, FriendFeed is the one that already has an established (and growing) community behind it. People are using it. Now that its real-time search functionality is here, expect people to use that plenty.

FriendFeed has climbed significantly over the last year in terms of unique visitors. There is a good chance it will continue to grow as the web continues its trend of becoming more social and people look to consolidate their social media streams.

So the more FriendFeed grows, the more people will realize that they can search in real-time throughout content across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all of the others shown in the image above. The only problem with this is that the results will only come from what is being shared via FriendFeed.

That’s where you come in.

If you do not have a FriendFeed account and have all of your relevant accounts and postings going into your stream, you will be missing out on appearing in users’ real-time searches.

This may become less of an issue when Google finally begins offering up real-time search. People are going to be using Google when they want to search for something for the foreseeable future. Once they add real-time search into the fold, I would imagine it will be the first place many turn for that as well.

We know it’s coming, but we don’t know when. Co-founder Larry Page has publicly acknowledged that it’s something the company has to do. Actually, Marissa Mayer, VP of search product and user experience was just talking about the importance of real-time search again.

But for the time being, FriendFeed may be at an advantage in the real-time search space as far as looking at real-time info from across the whole web, and not just what people are saying on Twitter. At the very least, it should make for an important tool in the real-time search toolbox, which as a whole, is very important for online reputation management.

Following are a few other articles worth reading for getting a better understanding of some benefits you can get from using FriendFeed, beyond just the real-time search aspect:

- Why You Should Use FriendFeed

- 10 Ways to Get more Out of FriendFeed

- How to Use FriendFeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

- How Bloggers Can Use FriendFeed Effectively

Do you use FriendFeed? Do you agree that it is an important tool? Share your thoughts.

Hitwise has shared some data regarding FriendFeed’s popularity in the UK. It’s growing fast, and has increased by 180% over the last 12 months in terms of traffic. It’s nowhere near what Facebook or Twitter get, but Hitwise’s Robin Goad says that "visitors to FriendFeed are typical early adopters – just the kind of people who were first to embrace Facebook, Twitter and a range of other social media success stories (as well as quite few failures along the way!)."

Hitwise provides a look at FriendFeed’s clickstream in July, and it shows that Google, Twitter, and Facebook are the biggest sources of traffic. Twitter is actually a bigger source based on this data, which should make it all the more attractive to Facebook. It would be kind of like Google getting a good portion of its traffic from Yahoo.

Facebook intends to let FriendFeed continue operating independently. It’s hard to say if Facebook’s ownership will significantly contribute to the traffic of FriendFeed.com. The acquisition appears to really be more about talent, and Facebook will likely begin incorporating FriendFeed’s technology into its own site. Either way, it’s probably a good buy for Facebook.

You can read more about the Facebook/FriendFeed/Real-Time Search Picture in the following articles:

Facebook Just Became More Important to Search

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Where’s Bing’s Real-Time Search?

So here we are talking about the latest trend in search, and notice that Microsoft and Yahoo, the other two (besides Google) that make up the traditional "big 3" search engines, were not mentioned. Microsoft and Yahoo of course recently announced a big search deal, which will see Yahoo’s search results powered by Microsoft’s Bing, and Microsoft gaining access to Yahoo’s own search technology.

So where is the real-time search from them?

Microsoft hasn’t completely ignored real-time search. In July, Bing began some integration of Twitter results. But that can hardly be considered real time search. It only works when you search for select people, and even then, you won’t always get the freshest tweets from that person, and certainly not as it was tweeted.

Bing is also involved in a project called BingTweets with Federated Media and Twitter. BingTweets is basically a site that looks at Twitter trends, and features a window with tweets on certain topics as they roll in real time, and another window with Bing results. But it also lets you search for something and provides both Bing results and Twitter results. The two entities are separate from one another, and BingTweets itself is separate from Bing.com. Basically, it is just like performing a Twitter search and a Bing Search at the same time while having a window open for each.

These efforts are not going to compete with the offerings discussed above. Bing is really Google’s only competitor as far as traditional search at this point. Yahoo counts as Bing now (or will soon enough). If Google is moving toward incorporating real real-time results into its results, that is one more edge they will have on Bing (on top of that incredible market share it already holds), unless Bing really gets in on the real-time action itself.

Bing has been hot since its launch. It has managed to create a lot of buzz. This is the biggest area where Microsoft has failed in search in the past – creating buzz. If Microsoft (along with Yahoo) wants to truly give Google a run for its money, as it obviously does, they should probably start bringing something more to the table in real-time search.