As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.

The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.

Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:

We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.

via Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items.

Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.