Supertrackr Tracks "Anything" on the Web, Instantly

Thanks to advances in the Web's real-time infrastructure over the last few years, our acceptance of latency or delay in discovery has practically been eliminated. We don't want to wait minutes or hours or days for news and information, and the freshness of content is essential. Often, when people want a near-instant reaction to world events, they're not looking to a filtered editorially driven source, such as CNN or Yahoo! News, but instead, they are looking to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and often blogs, to get the very latest.

This drive to be completely up to date has led to the development of tools that drive instant notification of "matches" to saved queries. Early in Twitter's infancy, one had the option to "track" a word and get instant notification of its being tweeted. But due to Twitter's rapid growth and some infrastructure holes, the feature has long since been dead. In its place has risen third-party tools and products that tap into Pubsubhubbub, a real-time notification protocol powering most of the world's blogs today, and many different content sites.

Among the most aggressive promoters of Pubsubhubbub and real-time notifications has been Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr, an infrastructure for real-time parsing of feeds in the cloud. Superfeedr recently launched a "Track" tool to instantly find Atom-based entries that match keywords pushed to a developer's application.

Chatting With Supertrackr and Tracking Results for Android

One of the simpler and more interesting applications of this tool that I have seen is called Supertrackr. Developed by @Harper, Supertrackr operates within any Jabber-based IM client (or Google Talk), and lets you follow or remove keywords, via something of a command line, and get updates instantly. The app taps into Google's App Engine and Superfeedr to drive results into your chat window as new entries.

Removing Android, and Seeing Updates on Other Keywords

For practical purposes, you probably don't want to "track" popular terms like "twitter" or "android" or "e-mail" because your chat window from Supertrackr would get flooded and you would have new entries before you even acknowledged the last ones. I tried, and it works, as advertised. Operating Supertracker is as easy typing "/track word" to follow a term and "/remove word" to stop. So if you are in a Jabber-based IM client or use Google Talk often, you could be leveraging Supertracker to find all URLs discussing hot topics, or following your company or brand.

Twitter may not have brought Track back, despite Steve Gillmor's insistence they do, but other developers are filling the gap to get us closer to that monitoring utopia of instant notifications on anything from any source anywhere. Check out Supertrackr at http://www.supertrackr.com/ or Superfeedr at http://superfeedr.com.

Guzzle Revamps Personal Aggregator, Adds iPhone App

The world of news personalization powered by RSS has been very interesting over the last year or so, with innovation coming from companies such as Lazyfeed, my6sense, Feedly and tweaks to Google Reader, including its "Magic" feature. One personalized aggregator, called Guzzle (which I first covered in July of 2009) has gotten less visibility, but the company is hoping to change that with two major updates - including the refresh of its news aggregator, and the introduction of an iPhone app - to let you get news on topics you have selected while on the go.

Guzzle Highlights News By Topic You Select, Displayed As You Wish

How you get news in today's world of streams varies by site. RSS readers primarily ask you to bring your own feeds. Social networks let you follow people. Some sites, like Regator, show you news from select sources by topic. Lazyfeed and Guzzle show you updates by topics you have picked, and the pages are regularly updated. But Lazyfeed doesn't yet have a mobile application, and Guzzle does. True to form, it quickly captured top stories on the topics I'm most interested in, and lets me view them one by one in the browser.

Guzzle's back-end has been completely rewritten from its 2009 launch, and is now powered by PubSubHubbub, thanks to support from Superfeedr. Every time a monitored feed publishes a new article, it is parsed by topic and assigned to the categories you may be viewing. This is similar to the work the late Socialmedian pioneered in 2008, but Guzzle has a portal-like interface to see the updates, reminiscent of My Alltop.


Guzzle's iPhone App Sorts By Topic
Interesting features of the new Guzzle? The product keeps track of every article published, and you can search its archives. You can also display news in an expanded mode, like Feedly, with large images (on the desktop version anyway).


Viewing Stories On Guzzle's iPhone App
While the desktop version of Guzzle is free, the iPhone application is $1.99. (get it here) If you don't mind parting with two bucks, Guzzle on the iPhone is a quick way to get caught up on the topics you're monitoring while mobile - and is an alternative to the personal prioritization of my6sense or the editorial sifting performed by Regator.

Guzzle also is transparent in terms of the sources that power its database. You can see them all here or can suggest new ones that haven't made the list.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Ping.fm Taps Superfeedr to Broadcast Realtime RSS Feeds

While the mass broadcast of status updates across multiple networks is something done best in moderation, the opportunity to distribute one's RSS feeds, from a blog or any other source, to potential viewers, no matter where they are, is core to the nature of the technology itself. Today, Ping.fm, the Seesmic-owned utility that allows for multi-network pollination, announced a new feature that gives RSS feeds the same flexibility as traditional status updates.

The solution is powered by Superfeedr, the real-time cloud based feed parser and publisher who I have long been bullish on thanks to their support and promotion of Pubsubhubbub, a protocol behind real-time data transmission from network to network.

With Superfeedr having already proven capable of acting as the back-end for real-time RSS distribution across the Web, Ping.fm's turning to Julien Genestoux and team makes logical sense, rather than trying to reinvent the process. Now Ping.fm is much more than a massive broadcaster of status updates, but a vehicle for RSS too.

See the official announcement here: Ping.fm Provides RSS Support

BackType Feeds Partners Faster, Thanks to PubSubHubbub

BackType, the most robust and feature-rich comments tracker on the Web, has expanded its services over the last few months to include a number of new items, including the launch of BackTweets, to find shared links on the microblogging service, a TweetCount plugin to highlight the number of times items have been retweeted, and a BackType Connect plugin for WordPress to show related conversations around the Web attached to your blog. The company's API is also used by popular services including Bit.ly and Disqus, who leverage the service to find external links and related tweets. Today, these downstream partners can expect updates to happen in near real-time, thanks to BackType's jumping on the PubSubHubbub bandwagon, in a partnership with Superfeedr, providing practically instantaneous updates downstream.

Superfeedr, one of the more aggressive services promoting PubSubHubbub, is providing the legwork for BackType, acting as a hub, pushing updates automatically as they are discovered. In today's post, BackType says the move reduces load on publishers by sending feed updates to all potential subscribers, without requiring multiple polls, and avoiding the arbitrary nature of clients' periodic requests.

If you subscribe to BackType to follow individuals' comments, or if you simply use Disqus or BackType connect on your blog, the move will ensure updates reach your content faster than they ever have before. In a Web world that is getting increasingly real-time, the name PubSubHubbub keeps popping up, and BackType is staying on the leading edge of innovation.