Anil Dash is excited about the potential for PubSubHubs and Web Hooks to really enable some legitimate push on the web.

Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there’s a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.

I don’t know if I’ll be calling the stack “pushbutton” any time soon, but it’s been fun to watch web hooks the last few months. I see this as being most useful in the shorter term for linking services together, rather than direct consumer plays. Definitely keep this on your radar.