Twitter has ended beta testing of the User Streams and portion of its Twitter Streaming API and brought it into regular production. While we've seen some clients take advantage of the User Streams, such as TweetDeck, the real-time Web is about to get a lot more real-time.
Continuing our series on product innovation and the people driving it, this week I spoke with the CEO and co-founder of Betaworks: John Borthwick. If you're unfamiliar with the name Betaworks, you will recognize the products under its umbrella: Bit.ly (the leading link shortener), TweetDeck (desktop Twitter client), Chartbeat (real-time analytics service) and SocialFlow (a social messaging service). As well as growing companies, Betaworks is a seed-stage investor in a range of real-time web companies - such as Tumblr, Twitterfeed, Superfeedr and Songkick.
In this two-part post, we give an overview of John Borthwick's product development philosophy. Then in part 2, to be published tomorrow, we will outline the evolution of one of Betaworks' products: Chartbeat.
Microsoft just announced that Bing Social - the company's Twitter and Facebook search engine - will now also recommend influential users that are connected to a given search term. If you search for "MTV," for example, Bing Social will recommend that you follow Justin Bieber and the band 30 Seconds to Mars on Twitter. According to Mike Ching and Shubha Nabar from the Bing Social team, the "People Recommendations" should make it easier for Bing users to find "interesting and relevant Twitter users based on your searches."
Every day, thousands of scheduled events happen on the Internet. These range from live video and audio shows to chats, poker tournaments and sales on Woot and Groupon. The problem, though, is that there is no single place to find out about these upcoming events. Live Matrix, which just launched, wants to change this. The service aims to be a TV Guide for all scheduled events on the Internet and currently indexes about 100,000 events per week.
At last year's Microsoft PDC, Seesmic announced that it was working on a major Silverlight-based rewrite of its desktop clients for Windows and Mac. After almost a year of development, the company just launched the final version of Seesmic Desktop 2. While it was still possible to describe Seesmic Desktop as a social networking client until today, the new version clearly aims to be far more than that. Thanks to a new plugin architecture and marketplace, you can now also use the application to track breaking news on TechMeme, listen to music on Last.fm and browse your news feeds with the help of the Google Reader plugin. In essence, Seesmic Desktop is now a platform for all things real time.
Google may have killed Wave (prematurely by some accounts), but it has added a little bit of real-time collaboration to one of its flagship offerings, Google Docs, with the addition of collaborative highlighting.
A few weeks ago, TweetDeck launched a limited beta of its Twitter client with support for Twitter's new User Streams Preview API and today, the company is opening up this beta to all. Thanks to this update, @mentions, direct messages and searches now appear in real time, without the need for TweetDeck to poll Twitter's servers at a regular interval. Instead of regularly contacting Twitter for updates, Twitter now immediately pushes updates directly to your desktop.
Everyone says Google doesn't "get" social media. What Google gets better than anyone else in the world, though, is search - combine the two and the company may have found a winning recipe.
Today Google announced (our coverage) that its real time search feature now has its own home page at Google.com/realtime and a number of new features. (If that link doesn't work, try this one for now.) The new Google Realtime is well executed, useful and certainly better than Twitter or Facebook's own search implementation to date. The downside? There's a lot that's missing that will limit the cool things that could be done with it.
Over the weekend, SEO consultant Rob Ousbey opened up Google and was surprised to find that the search engine no longer required him to hit the "enter" key - it simply searched as he typed.
The feature, which Google confirmed it is testing on a select number of users, goes one big step beyond Google Suggest and provides streaming search results as you type.
As Facebook becomes more and more popular, the social network giant is putting more emphasis on the real-time feed. In other words, the activities of your friends displayed in reverse chronological order on your Facebook homepage. In the old days of Facebook - and indeed traditionally with social networks like MySpace and Friendster - you'd visit a person's profile page to see what they're up to. Facebook changed this paradigm in September 2006, when it introduced the news feed as the primary way to keep track of your friends. In October 2009, that feature was re-named the "live feed" and Facebook introduced a more filtered news feed for your homepage.
With these evolutions, do you still browse your friends' profiles on a regular basis? Or do you mostly rely on the live and news feeds to consume content on Facebook? We posed that question to our community on Facebook and Twitter.
