egarding Delicious and the real-time discussion, I did some thinking on the evolution of site this summer and its move to track number of tweets. It's a huge shift for a service that started out focused on bookmarking, AKA finding older stuff to use later, to jump on the real-time boat so it can start saving AND sharing what's happening NOW.

Delicious is the kind of service relies on people to take action and bookmark, so essentially it is using real-time results to find important or relevant information faster, to then add them to the social-bookmark-osphere

http://www.kondigg.com

LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

http://www.businessinsider.com/7-free-real-time-web-tools-for-publishers-2009-12

I was just thinking about better apps. Kind of like make the internet work like a really fast Iphone.

Something along those lines. The internet is changing in a way that i can't handle.

There are going to be too many voices going on that want your attention.

It's not gonna deliver. It won't stand.

I agree that services like Twitter and FriendFeed are producing more and smaller bits of content, but I don't see how this represents a "new class" of content. Yes, Google and Facebook are piggybacking on these efforts, but they aren't really building anything new. Instead, they are just tweaking existing formats. Essentially what you describe as the real-time web is traditional content publishing, but centralized and within the social graph - something that has existed and been growing for over a decade now. The content generated doesn't represent some new emergent form, rather it is indicative of the laziness and short attention spams that have come to dominate how users interact with the web. In other words, it is simply blogging pared down. The speed at which aggregation can occur isn't of some new breed, rather it is a natural progression of technological growth, and a direct result of centralized publication (something that can lead to problems - see Twitter outages/Facebook privacy issues/XSS worms/etc.). I agree that the social graph, combined with short form publishing is leading us to a more real-time web, but again, this is a natural progression and not some revelation that we should look at in awe. That's not saying there are no benefits in the products you mention, just that the response should be tempered.

In addition, I think (HOPE) we will find over time that what matters is the quality of information, not the quantity. My prediction is that the "real-time web" you mention will both fuel the next cycle and eventually be the next cycle's downfall. What we seem to have here is a lot of jargon, a lot of hype, a lot of selling, and no ROI. It's a shame that we can't learn from history.

It's like water cooler conversation, great to see what's on people's minds, Iraq Elections, etc, but not so great for getting solid references or factual definitions, or, you name it. For that, I want Google, or some search engine hitting all the traditional web pages.

Delicious is the kind of service relies on people to take action and bookmark, so essentially it is using real-time results to find important or relevant information faster, to then add them to the social-bookmark-osphere

More here.

I disagree. With products like Twitter and Friendfeed, we've seen a new class of content producing and aggregation products - and they produce more, smaller and *faster* bits of content than previously.

Plus look at the changes Google and Facebook, for example, have gone through this year - which I illustrated in this post.

As for Google Wave, that hasn't been released yet.

Pete good point re Twitscoop. Would love to know of more products like that, that make use of real-time web data.

Fabian Pattberg

As you said, read-time web is truly a phenomenon right now though the name is still a little bit awkward.

On the other hand, however, if everything is real time, nothing is real time. The real time information is valuable only if there are plenty of its opposite, not-real-time information. The true value is the utility that may carry the real time to the lasting time. Otherwise, real time could just be short lived.

For the Web researchers and developers, I have just posted a brief list of issues about the real time web that they may be interested in learning. Nonetheless, I agree to you that the real-time web must be a major Web trend at present that we need to study carefully.

--yihong

When many start speaking, it becomes difficult to get something interesting from the noise.

I feel, a few players knowing how to use the technology would make real-time services go distances

It doesn't mean only a few chunk of the entire population need to use the technology but only a few chunk of people connected together, a small network.

Twitter already is becoming very noisy.

A small network of people using the technology wisely would be the call.

I respectfully disagree with the lack of use cases you mention for all this real-time data though. I'd like to think Twitscoop (and other twitter discovery tool) is/are a good example of real-time content / news discovery powered by the data we collectively produce.