Last week, Google hosted its developer conference Google I/O.  There were sessions on mobile, chrome, social, geolocation, SEO, and the App Engine.  One of them that piqued my interest was v2.0 of their feeds API, including real time updates of RSS and Atom feeds.

Real time updates impact users in several ways:

• They’re kept up to date if a feed is updated while they’re viewing it.
• They get the convenience of live updates – they don’t have to constantly reload to see if a feed updated.
• They’re updated more quickly because the distributed model shares the burden with many servers (ok this one is more about PubSubHubBub but it’s still cool).

The basic difference is that in the old model (in green below) publishers and users were out of sync.  Publishers pushed new content whenever they had content available, and users sought new content whenever they wanted it.  This model is very inefficient.  How many of you have spent time sitting on a site hitting refresh waiting for the new content to publish?

Enter PubSubHubBub and push API v2.  Each group – publishers and users – act independently and the hubs act as an intermediary.  No more waiting with you finger on the F5 key.

You may have noticed a theme to my posts this week – they’re both about speed increases through code, services or protocols.  Information is getting to users faster and at a greater volume than ever.  This brings the obvious question of how do people stay on top of it all.  I expect this to be an continual struggle for all of us.  Look for tools and services to evolve to help us keep up.