Daily Tech and Gadget

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension Google Reader Notifier not only shows your current unread count and adds quick access with a popup dialog window, but it’s also the official Google notifier for Reader. More »

If you like calendar reminders but you’d like them a little less in-your-face, you can enable gentle reminders in Google Calendar to replace the reminder pop up. More »

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It’s beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate. Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social web .

Filed under: Software Designer/Developer Christopher Lobay has been hard at work making some excellent Styles for the system notification app, Growl . Growl displays temporary, floating notification windows above your desktop to let you know about things like new messages, completed downloads, changes in Skype availability, etc. Many applications have Growl support built in, so if you’re not using it already, you should check it out. Once you do, you’ll want to customize the way it looks, and that’s where Christopher, among legions of others, comes in. Published a while back, the first Growl style I want to highlight is “Basics.” Basics provides a very minimalist black background on which it animates the icon of the application responsible for the notification.

While Seesmic has been available for BlackBerry handsets since right around the end of November, it has thus far required you to manually download the application by visiting http://m.seesmic.com/. That’s like what, a million letters to type? Typing is for chumps. Fortunately for all of us lazy-thumbed folks, RIM has just given Seesmic the greenlight for distribution in the BlackBerry App World – no typing required. Seesmic is celebrating their newfound availability with an update to the client, adding a handful of new features to the mix.

The real-time web was hot this year and it’s likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We’ve tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb’s Best Products of 2009: Pubsubhubbub Pubsubhubbub , created as a 20% project by Googlers Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick, is described as “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.” It delivers updated content in real-time from a pinged hub server out to all subscribers that have requested updates.