HN user
Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury
They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.
"Promoted Stories" myth needs to end. It wasn't the case, there was a severe bug whereby a Regular Expression only matched RSS content. The Regular Expression acted as a gateway into the Popular Algorithm. I worked at Digg and I fixed that bug.
It wasn't noticed before launch because we echoed the v3 popular stories into the beta version of v4.
Digg was never paid for stories hitting the frontpage. And for all the flack it gets for this myth, it should have been.
But what about WebSockets in non-browser contexts. I have to wonder if Square does this with its SocketRocket http://corner.squareup.com/2012/02/socketrocket-websockets.h...
Think of desktop apps that keep a connection to the server and are awaiting messages from it. I think it might get interesting, maybe not the best application of WebSockets, but interesting. Your Email client wouldn't have to poll every X seconds to see if new mail has arrived.
I pretty sure that is Search Plus Your World customizing the results for you.
pushover.net is number 10 when I search in an incognito window.