ReadWriteWeb

Paul Buchheit built the first version of Gmail in one day. Then, he built the first prototype of Google's contextual advertising service, Adsense, in one day as well. Now, he's working on a much-watched startup called FriendFeed that he believes just brought to market the next big form of communication online: flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

"The open, realtime discussions that occur on FriendFeed," he says, "are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." That's a pretty ambitious claim, but Buchheit has the credibility to make it.

FriendFeed opened up a new beta today that introduces a completely revamped real-time user interface, as well as a number of interesting new features, including direct messages, the ability to share posts more selectively, better searches and filters, as well as a number of other smaller changes that make the new user interface very different from its predecessor.

FriendFeed has regularly made changes to its UI, but this new design is clearly the biggest change yet.

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Twitter just announced that it is slowly releasing a new interface to a subset of its users that will put Twitter Search and Trends right on users' profiles. Until now, Twitter's real-time search function, which was acquired from Summize last year, lived on a separate subdomain and was not fully integrated into Twitter. Clearly, Twitter has realized that real-time search is one of its core features if it wants to monetize its service successfully.

The era of dominance is shrinking. IBM dominated tech longer than Microsoft did, and Google's period of dominance will be even shorter. As with IBM and Microsoft, a great and wealthy company will remain (after a painful period of post-dominance restructuring). But during the period of dominance, it is hard to imagine anything else. Vast fortunes are lost in attempting a head-on challenge (whether they are search engine challengers to Google, operating system challengers to Microsoft, etc.), and disruption never happens that way. Google has no problem adding enough semantic smarts to see any challenger off. It's the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious.