Google has had some pretty remarkable new technologies emerge from 20 percent side projects, but few match the promise of Pubsubhubbub. If you haven’t heard of it before don’t feel bad, its adoption is even worse than the RSS standard it seeks to replace. The elevator speech for Pubsubhubbub is pretty simple, it’s RSS, only in real time. This is a huge improvement over the current system which periodically polls the content servers to look for changes which waste both time and bandwidth. Think of it as push notifications for your favorite websites.

The creators of Pubsubhubbub Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slakin haven’t gained much traction as of yet, but the two have already moved on to a more ambitious project codenamed “Camlistore”. As with anything Google engineers touch, Camlistore is actually a code name for “Content-Addressable Multi-layer Indexed Storage”. Put in plain English Camlistore is described as a new way to store, sync, share, and back up content. The team doesn’t compare itself to Dropbox or MySQL, though they admit it could be adapted in the future to provide similar functionality.

The open source project is still in its infancy at this point, but I for one am pleased to see Googler’s embracing a cloud computing strategy that embraces both online and local storage. Dropbox has proven that a happy medium can exist between the two, which makes us optimistic for the future of Camlistore.

Head on over to camlistore.org if you want to learn more or sign up to help the developers.