One of my goals for inthing.io was to make posting events realtime, in that events appear without a page refresh, and within a fraction of a second. And that largely seems to work.
Here's a quick screencast that shows it working:
I'll post about how it works in detail at some point, but the general gist is that there is a Tornado websocket server that inthing uses to broadcast information about updates. That server may be worth open-sourcing if there is enough interest. It could be useful for other projects, and its entirely independent.