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Google’s big push recently has been on enabling open, real-time technologies to publish, read, and interact with its new service Buzz. Reader, its RSS subscription and website reading service, is one of the biggest tools to integrate with the service. So much that my Reader contacts are now my Buzz contacts. Until now, Google Reader, while when it would share your posts, it would send updates to subscribing services via Pubsub Hubbub (PSHB), it did not support the reading end of it for supported blogs that publish via PSHB.

Just after my last post on Google ironically, I noticed immediately after publishing people were sharing my post, something very unusual for the service, which usually takes up to an hour for my posts to show up on the site. Going into Reader, I noticed it had immediately recognized my post. I quickly queried a friend of mine at Google, who stated, “They can neither confirm nor deny my suspicion” (that it was launched), but I was “observant”. Sounds like they just launched Pubsub Hubbub support.

WordPress-enabled Blogs that want to be seen immediately after publishing in Google Reader just need to install Josh Fraser’s Pubsub Hubbub plugin for WordPress. After hitting publish, your post should appear immediately afterwards in PSHB-supported clients, which, if I am correct, now includes Google Reader’s massive user base.

If this is true, you should see this post immediately after I hit publish in Google Reader. Assuming I’m right (which it seems so), Robert Scoble’s concern of it taking too long to get news (#5) just went out the door today – he can now get this just as fast, if not faster than any service such as Twitter, FriendFeed, or Buzz, and this way, he gets to read the full content of the article. When I hit publish on this post you will see it immediately. You are subscribed to my feeds, right?

UPDATE: Just after hitting publish it appeared immediately in Google Reader on this post as well. I’m 99.9% sure now that PSHB was launched on Google Reader today.

Image courtesy http://www.scotduke.com/getting-a-drink-out-of-a-fire-hose/

I’ve talked in the past about how I read your blogs. I rarely subscribe through Google Reader any more – I read all of your blogs through FriendFeed. Therefore if you want me to read your blog, I strongly suggest taking the first step of importing it into FriendFeed. Well, if that weren’t reason enough, FriendFeed just gave you even one more reason to import your blog and other social data into their site: real-time search.

If you’ll look down in the lower-right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see an example of it in action – every mention of “realtime”, “real time”, “social”, “friendfeed”, “twitter”, “facebook”, or “Jesse Stay” anywhere on the web, at any time that has been imported into FriendFeed now appears real-time, as it’s happening. Go ahead – change the search parameters to something like “earthquake”, or “iran”, or “michael jackson”. You’ll quickly see the value of having such real-time, on-demand search at your fingertips.

FriendFeed is said to be getting ready to also release notifications, probably in the same way they do your other friend lists and feeds via e-mail and IM for the various search terms you’re trying to find. As the terms come in real-time, you’ll receive them. This is powerful stuff!

Over a year ago Twitter had a similar feature – they called it “track”, which they’ve recently re-introduced to developers via their API. It was the main reason I joined and stuck with Twitter. As soon as their competition was dead they removed it. It looks as though FriendFeed has one-upped Twitter once again with this feature.

So if you haven’t already, go to FriendFeed, get an account, import all your Twitter and Facebook friends already on the service (you’ll find most of your active friends probably already are!), and start adding your blogs, Twitter feeds, facebook feeds, photos, videos, and more into your stream so they too can be indexed by this powerful search. The web just got a whole lot more real-time, and FriendFeed just got a whole lot more powerful.