Have you heard of PubSubHubbub? No? Where have you been? As far as hot technologies go, it's the new RSS. In fact, not since RSS technology surfaced and gained traction has a Web protocol garnered so much attention.

In an age when real-time online conversations have become the rule and not the exception thanks to Twitter and others of its ilk, PubSubHubbub is an open-source publish/subscribe protocol that allows programmers to turn existing Atom and RSS feeds into real-time data streams.

It basically makes RSS and Atom feeds blazingly fast, providing Web-hook notifications when Atom and RSS feeds are updated and delivering to Web applications near-real-time information about what's new or changed.

This is where the whole Web is headed. Read Anil Dash's piece on the Pushbutton Web to catch the idea train; it's a great ride.

PubSubHubbub was created by Brett Slatkin, a software engineer on the Google App Engine team, and LiveJournal founder and OpenID wizard Brad Fitzpatrick.

So it's no surprise that Google has enabled the PubSubHubbub protocol to speed up its FeedBurner, Reader shared items, Blogger and, as of Aug. 19, Google Alerts services.

Slatkin said of PubSubHubbub support on Google Alerts: "Think of it as an AJAX search API that tells you when it finds new results. Acting upon these notifications your app could update your Website, e-mail friends, send an SMS--the possibilities are endless."

More PubSubHubbub-enabled Web services, including full implementation on Google Reader, Google Latitude, Picasa and YouTube, are on the way. Google even gave PubSubHubbub a colorful, easily identifiable logo:

PubSubHubbub is also the cornerstone of Google's programmable Web push to enable one application to be extended by another to create new applications that people haven't imagined before. As Slatkin noted in this post on PubSubHubbub support for Google Alerts: "This goes beyond mashups, which primarily combine data sources together into new views."

However, don't expect Google to own this technology, as it notes on the PubSubHubbub API page: "The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can publish or subscribe using open hubs."