The realtime web is about to get even more immediate and distributed.
Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.
Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.
Messages from your blog, website, or application will be delivered to whoever wants them within one second via cheap, open source cloud hosting and software.
One way this is being done is with pubsubhubbub, an open source platform developed by two Google engineers. It has no Google-specific code in it and anyone can use it to set up their own hub server.