The real-time web is a broad and rich phenomenon emerging online. A wide variety of companies are building and using it in really diverse ways. YourVersion offers a real-time discovery engine for finding streams of content about topics you're interested in. Aardvark is using friends of friends networks, profile data built up over time and presence information ("the real-time web of people") to deliver answers to almost any question you can ask it. Kaazing uses HTML5 WebSockets to open secure, persistent connections to push data and allow financial institutions to use web interfaces instead of installed software, often for the first time. Those are just three of the many different companies on the cutting edge of the real-time web.
Because this field is so new and is seeing such breadth of innovation, people have a lot of questions about it. Next month we're hosting a full-day event to engage with those questions together, called the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Below are some of our favorite questions that Early Bird registrants said last week that they want to tackle
Google just announced that it is integrating its Content ID system, which alerts YouTube's 1,000 partners when one of their videos or audio tracks is being used without authorization, and YouTube Insight, the analytics package that gives uploaders usage stats for their videos. Content ID gives copyright owners the ability to block a video or audio track, but most importantly, it also allows them to make money from these uploads by selling ads against these new videos (like Sony did with the JK Wedding Entrance Dance). Until today, YouTube's partners only got a very basic set of stats about these videos, but they will now get the same stats that the uploader gets as well.
Apple today announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.
Did you see the latest Jude Law movie? The film, a murder mystery from art house director Sally Potter takes place in Manhattan's fashion world and features other famous actors including Dame Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi, John Leguizamo, and Dianne Wiest. "Rage," as the film is called, isn't all that remarkable in and of itself, but the way it's being distributed is: via mobile phones. Choosing to forgo the typical theatrical release, Potter went an entirely different route for her new indie flick: Rage premiered exclusively on the iPhone.
As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, which is just over two weeks away, in this post we're listing 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies - so we invite you to list more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top 100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.
A reminder that the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit is happening 15th October in Mountain View, California. Many of the ReadWriteWeb team will be there, so we look forward to meeting and talking with you all! You can register here for the low price of $195.
Last week's flurry of Twitter DM spam from hacked or phished accounts wasn't the first instance of that and won't be the last.
As long as people are willing to trust their Twitter log-in information to third parties - and don't look carefully at URLs before they log into websites - and as long as a small number of bad actors want to pee in the social media swimming pool, this kind of thing will continue happening.
Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to explore the latest Web technology products and trends. We're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So, once a week, we write a post about them; about who they are, what they do, and what they've been up to lately. Pay them a visit or tweet them a "Thank you" (see link below each sponsor) to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site. You can also start following some or all of our sponsors on Twitter with a few clicks on this TweepML page.
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Just a reminder: ReadWriteWeb's own Real-Time Web Summit is only a few weeks away, and some excellent participants are now signed up. You can download the event calendar below in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
Forest fires in California, the plane landing on the Hudson river, the Mumbai hotel attacks - these historical events and many more have been recorded by everyday people on the ground, using Twitter. The historic record may be much, much richer as a result - but you can't access it through search.twitter.com right now.
Many people have worried that the inaccessibility of historical Twitter search results might mean that the messages weren't being saved at all. Company co-founder Biz Stone told us otherwise by email today, though. Twitter is in fact saving all the tweets. You just can't access them through search "right now."
