ReadWriteWeb

Google announced this morning that it is enabling real-time discussions on YouTube channels by adding support for Google Moderator. Moderator allows sites to request questions or ideas from its audience that can then be voted up or down by the site's community of visitors. The service had previously only made appearances on YouTube for exclusive interviews with President Obama and the Prime Minister of Canada, but as of today every channel has the ability to add this feature.

In the month since the well blowout beneath the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the real-time Web has been leveraged to communicate between concerned parties. At other times it has been noteworthy for how it could have been used but wasn't. Here are five instances where the real-time Web intersected with the blowout's aftermath and those caught in its wake.

1. No Real-Time Connection from the Rig

Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon rig, told the U.S. Congress that the last seven hours of data on the day of the blowout are missing. There was, in effect, no "black box." Nor, according to the Associated Press, was there any real-time data available from the rig in the aftermath. This despite one of the actors, Halliburton, being contractual required to provide just such a link to shore officials.

The Web is no longer static pages of text and still images. It's alive with tweets, tweetups, live video conferences, uStreams, live-blogged product launches, webinars, live auctions, virtual world meetups and events, time-limited sales and contests, live audio and video podcast recordings, live chats, and more. And it's all happening in real-time. If you happen to be online during one of these events, then you're a part of the action, a part of the now-ness of the new Web. But if you log off for a minute (gasp!), you could miss it all.

What's the solution? Stay up all night? A new startup launching this week called Live Matrix has a better idea. Live Matrix is your program guide to the real-time Web, allowing you to search, save and create reminders for all the live Web events you want to be a part of.

The theme of our upcoming Real-Time Web Summit in New York City is use cases for the Real-Time Web. In the run-up to our June 11 event, we'll publish a series of posts exploring use cases across a variety of industries - finance, enterprise, science, education, and more. We aim to show just how much potential there is for real-time technologies in the real world.

By now most of you will be familiar with the technology of the Real-Time Web. It's about immediacy of content, presence information, efficiency and responsiveness. Twitter and Facebook have become the poster children for the Real-Time Web, however there's much more to it than those two products. To prove that, here's a list of five other use cases for the Real-Time Web.

Google PowerMeter is one of many Google side projects that don't often get a lot of attention, but PowerMeter is slowly growing to become a bit more than just a hobby for the search giant. Today, Google announced that it has partnered with Current Cost, the largest global supplier of real-time displays for monitoring energy use. Starting today, Current Cost will allow its users in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand to send data about their power consumption directly to Google PowerMeter.

ReadWriteWeb's first East Coast event - the Real-Time Web Summit - will be taking place on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. Be sure to register now as we are extending the $395 ticket price until Wednesday, May 26.

The Real-Time Web is a set of technologies that impacts almost every service, activity and application on the Web. Come to the summit to understand how it impacts you, your business and your next development.

Team ReadWriteWeb will be in New York City on June 11th to host our 3rd public event, the Real-Time Web Summit. It will be an East Coast version of the successful ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit we held in Mountain View last October. Earlier this month we were in Mountain View again for the ReadWrite Mobile Summit, which also rocked.

Our events bring together a few hundred of the smartest, most interesting developers, businesspeople and visionaries in key emerging areas of the Internet industry. They follow a format that is unorthodox but deeply thought provoking (as that's how we like to roll) called the Unconference. This expert-moderated but participant-led event format makes ReadWriteWeb events some of the most high-value in the industry. You don't have to take our word for it, though. Check out what some attendees have said:

Google just announced the general launch of Google Wave at its annual developer conference in San Francisco. Until today, Wave was an invite-only service, but starting now, anybody with a Google account will be able to log into Wave and use it without any restrictions. Google will also enable Wave for Google Apps users today. In order to educate these new users, the Google Wave team has also created a number of new videos and case studies that highlight how organizations can use Wave to collaborate more effectively.

Google announced early this morning that it would acquire Global IP Solutions Holding. The company provides the VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx and Lotus conferencing and had said last month that it would be the first to bring video chat to Android phones.

Google has offered $68.2 million for the company, which it has said it will use for real-time video and audio communications.

Updated at 9:30 PM PST with comment from Google. Google posted an unlisted video to YouTube tonight showing details of a 2.0 version of its Feed API, a simple tool for displaying recent headlines from a syndicated feed on any web page. The new version will accept real-time PubSubHubbub feeds and will publish new headlines to a site visitor's browser within seconds of their being published to the feed.

This new version turns the Feed API from cool to super-cool. It's a good example of the way much of the web is likely to go in the near-term future. No more refreshing pages to see when new content is available - the real-time web comes to you live, nearly instantly as soon as it's published.