According to OneRiot these ads lead to "click through rates at four times industry norms." While we can't verify this data, it doesn't come as a surprise that these ads, which usually point to interesting and relevant content on OneRiot's partner sites would have high click-through rates, especially if users are already on news site or are using a browser-based Twitter tool. On the other hand, we also don't know what kind of payout website owners can expect from these ads, so a higher click-through rate could still mean that publishers end up earning just as much money from RiotWise as they currently do from AdSense or similar programs.

But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

Update: We got a chance to sit and chat with Moka Pantages today and she took a moment to clarify that she was specifically referring to students using and quoting Wikipedia in research papers. We apologize for any misrepresentation of her stance. Here is her clarification:

I absolutely believe Wikipedia is a good, trustworthy source for contextual news and information and should be used by everyone, including students, as a resource. When I was asked during the panel whether or not Wikipedia should be accepted as a source for college papers, it was my opinion that, just like any other encyclopedia, I don't think it should be cited as a reference source. However, I do think it's a great starting point for students to start their research and begin to understand the topic or issue they are writing about.

Tackling Real-Time Content

Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage.

"When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event."

The Newsroom Moves Online

"The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff."

While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered.

The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story.

Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks

One particular user, Kensplanets, was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations.

"It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there."

According to Pantages, by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news.

Wikipedia As News Aggregator

"There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said.

So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.

In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors.

While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.

With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.

Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see.

• Wave Sudoku (play Sodoku with friends in a Wave)
• Extension Installer (for developers only)
• Colcrop (game)
• Yellow highlighter (highlight text)
• Napkin gadget (for doodles)
• Waffle (date-picker)
• Iframe gadget (embed webpages in a Wave)
• Yes/No/Maybe gadget (for polls)
• Map gadget (insert maps)
• Video Chat Experience (chat in Waves)
• Phone Conference (call your friends)
• Mind Map gadget (collaborate on diagrams)
• Likey gadget (like/dislike a topic)
• Pollo gadget (for surveys)
• Take-out gadget (for ordering out)
• AccuWeather (weather forecasts)

Will Extensions Bring You Back to Wave?

With Google Wave soon becoming a member of the Google Apps family of products sometime this year, it's good to see development work continue on this innovative, if somewhat confusing, real-time tool. Although members of the tech community have expressed mixed feelings about the product in its current state, what Google has presented is definitely a unique service and one that may still be useful in several niche scenarios, if not as the email replacement some hoped it would be. For example, small teams in the workplace needing to collaborate with one another may find Wave a better option than sending multiple emails back and forth.

That being said, traffic to Google Wave has been declining sharply since November or December of 2009, depending which analytics service you use. Looking at the numbers, it's clear that Wave has been abandoned by many of its earliest adopters - users who were once clamoring for invites in ways that haven't been seen since Google first launched Gmail. (On that note, we actually have several spare invites sitting around - if you want one, comment and ask.)

Will extensions actually bring those one-time Wavers back? Probably not - at least, not for longer than a quick look at most. On the flip side, however, Wave advocates feel that there's great potential in this experimental project. Still, even most of those folks have to admit there's a lot of work that needs to be done before Wave could attract a mainstream audience.

So will Wave ever replace email? Perhaps not. But we wouldn't be surprised if some of the innovations developed in the Wave playground ended up in our Gmail inboxes one day. And for that, we'll keep one eye on Wave...even if we're not entirely embracing it just yet.

Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook.

When you're a search engine, you obviously have an exhaustivity requirement. You can't really skip on indexing the Indian Ocean. Google sends its bo(a)ts all over the ocean where it's raining to update its index. However, the ocean is growing so fast that it will eventually become harder and harder to stay exhaustive.

Unfortunately, not only the ocean is growing, but it's also raining more, which means that if a bo(a)t is away from a zone for too long, when it will be back it will have changed tremendously. That's what happens when you see results in a search engine that are 1- or 2-years old, or even older. They're not wrong, they're just often inaccurate, but rank well.

It's a real technical problem for search engines to know where to send their bo(a)ts, and at the right time! And when Google says they're going to feed their search index with PubSubHubbub data, that's what they're trying to do: save a little bit on the boats.

I strongly disagree with John Battelle when he says this is not a huge deal. My take is that he sees this only as a great technical and infrastructure opportunity for Google, not so much as an immediate benefit for the end user. I strongly disagree - and so do you. You disagreed when you typed "earthquake" into Twitter Search, or even "hudson crash", or "Mickael Jackson". At that point, you knew that Google wasn't able to provide you with the information you were looking for, and this is a massive loss for Google.

Google will have a hard time getting this brain share back. The first thing it needs to do is to actually have results that date back from the minute when people look for these things.

You may argue that if you search 10 times a day on Google, you go maybe once a week to Twitter search. I'm the same, no worries. Yet, I know that Twitter is much better than Google at contextualization. When I do a search on Google, I expect to find the absolute truth. If I look for earthquake, I'm looking at facts about earthquakes: pictures or maybe historical data. If I look for earthquake on Twitter, I'm looking for context; I want what is being said about earthquakes now (and here!).

As a matter of facts, Google always had a lot of issues about context because they know so little about the people who search there (or maybe they know a lot, but don't want to scare us). Adding PubSubHubbub is a way for them to be able to take the "time dimension" back. They many never have the conversations that Twitter has, but they will have a much bigger ocean of data than Twitter's sea of Tweets

Photo by Pam Roth.

Google already indexes a whole lot of content very quickly, will a real-time indexing system make a big difference? There are differences of opinion on the matter and we'd like to know what you think. Search analyst Danny Sullivan told us on Wednesday that he thought it could be "the next chapter" for Google. John Battelle said this morning: "In short, it's a new way for Google to get (more) real time signals. But honestly, not a huge deal. I don't think. Correct me if I'm wrong..." What do you think, readers?

As we wrote on Wednesday:

PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but [Google's Brett] Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn't be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.

Readers Who Think This is Big

Sharon Kavanagh says:

This all sounds fantastic for the small guy as I have just created my first ever website which is for a reunion. The site will only be live for a short period as the date is May15th 2010 for the event and yet, it will probably take Google till then before my site is indexed and hence the peple I am trying to reach will never find it.

Scott Holodak says:

Previously you had to wait for spiders to crawl around the web to find changes on your site. Pages are crawled over again and again just to see if anything has changed. It's a pretty inefficient process. Now the spiders are going to be fat and lazy because you are going to deliver your changes directly to them.

No Big Deal

Reader comments arguing this is not a big deal.

"Scott" says:

A properly designed website already "pushes" to (more accurately: gets "pulled" by) search engines and the frequency of indexing by search engines is determined by the popularity of the website.

This information doesn't seem too new to me.

Bruce Wayne says:

Pushing unstructured content in real time can only mean the non relevant results will make it into the search results faster. To me this is another google hocus pocus distraction away from the the fact that search as it is today has hit a wall....millions of pages on unstructured data created exclusively to game the system....and now these pages of non relevant content can be pushed into the search stream in real time....

What Do You Think?

I think there is something fundamentally different about a web that Google's index subscribes to in real time vs. a web that Google has to plow through with a spider looking for new content. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but there's something about the PuSH method that feels like it would make the Google index a living, breathing phenomenon.

What do you think?

What this means, essentially, is that you no longer need to wait for your news reader to ping your blog every so often to find out if there are any updates - you'll find out in real time.

Just like the adoption of RSSCloud last fall, there is no need to opt-in or install a plugin for a blog hosted on Wordpress.com to become PuSH enabled - it's already active. For Wordpress blogs hosted separately, a PuSH plugin, PuSHPress is now available for download.

This is yet another big step in our progression to a real-time Web. Last month, Google Reader went real time by consuming PuSH feeds, meaning they show up on the news site almost immediately after being published to the originating site. In conjunction, this means that any Wordpress.com hosted blogs, as well as any PuSH enabled blogs running Wordpress, will be immediately available on Google Reader and any other reader set to work with PuSH.

This also means that, if you want to be on the razors edge of what's happening on the Web, you can also receive chat notifications of PuSH enabled blogs. RSS readers can be so last year when you can get a chat notification the instant a piece of content is published.

For a further explanation of PubSubHubbub, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's article from last year's Real Time Web Summit.

This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter's current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.

The Firehose, as compared to standard API access, does not have the same limits on how much a program accesses the data, which means much more real-time interaction is possible.

Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta, said that these partnerships show that "real-time is real," calling this "the natural progression of the validation of real-time as a mode of information gathering."

Twitter's blog post, titled "Enabling A Rush of Innovation", reads at times like a proclamation from above, but we have to admit we're excited to see what can come of this. "Full investment," reads the post "in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. [...] With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we're pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible. "

Twitter seems to be making a point that even the little guy can get access to the full wealth of the Firehose and if this is true, then real-time interaction is just moments away from the smallest of startups.

But for now, the fact that this wealth of data is suddenly available to a number of real-time search engines can mean something big for the ad platform. As we wrote last Friday, Peter Kafka uncovered some details on the proposed advertising platform, one being that "the ads will only show up in search results."

These partnerships could mean that these advertisements just gained a new real-time audience, outside of the big three. We asked Twitter about this but have yet to receive comment.

Google currently controls around 90% of the search engine market, according to StatCounter, with Yahoo and Bing its closest competitors. Will Bing's exclusive access to Facebook user updates change this at all?

Yahoo recently brokered a deal with Twitter, and Bing expanded its partnership with Facebook to become the default on-site search engine for the social network. Also included in the Bing deal was the ability to fully index public user updates, but this functionality is not yet available.

While it may be true that having access to only Facebook Fan Page updates puts Google at a disadvantage in terms of the sheer volume of content indexed, do we really want to have every piece of content shared by those 400 million users in our search results? A recent post here on ReadWriteWeb garnered a large stream of traffic from the more technologically inept portion of Facebook's user base - and the resulting comments were less than intellectual.

As Brandee Barker, a spokeswoman for Facebook, told us the other day, "Facebook Pages are designed to provide authentic voices for public figures, celebrities, and organizations." While some are arguing these new results will just be a stream of advertisements and self-promotion, they will focus on official voices from organizations and the content they want to share.

We're not sure about you, but maybe we don't want to hear every little thing every person on the planet has to say about everything. Although the Internet is a great and democratizing force, perhaps having some filters remain in place isn't the end of the world. It can be hard enough just keeping up with the stream of updates as it is. Adding the daily chatter of 400 million may just go one step too far - although we'd still like the option.

Maybe, in the end, this will give Bing a bigger share of the search engine market, and that isn't a bad thing. Just like a multi-party political system offers more choices, maybe a more balanced search engine market would be better for us, too. When we want the official word from official organizations, we can go to Google. When we want to put our finger on the pulse of the 400 million users, we can go to Bing.

Her conversation with Kirkpatrick started with the basics of what real time is, and then moved to the big question: How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?

"Think of how Facebook notifies you that you have new messages without having to refresh the page, or the way your Instant Messaging client shows you new messages as soon as they are sent. The underlying technologies used in those kinds of circumstances are now being integrated into all kinds of other websites because real-time delivery of information changes the user experience radically and offers all kinds of benefits. It's smoother for users, users and systems get to take action immediately on new information and it's much more efficient, meaning that your technology can do more with less computing expense."

When did RWW start focusing on the real-time Web?
"Probably middle of 2008. Like people generally do, we thought about the impact that Twitter and Facebook were making on the web. When we looked deeper though, we quickly found out that there is far, far more going on in the real-time web than those two services."

For the report, you interviewed 50 Web experts - what were some of the surprising things you heard?
"I was surprised to learn how broad this field is. We talked to people working with public records extraction in real time, with designers building lightweight, real-time presentation sharing tools, Google engineers have some incredible ideas about ways they hope that their PubSubHubbub real-time protocol will be used - stuff like real-world sensor networks and contact info syncing. When I started those interviews, I knew there were broad possibilities but I had no idea how broad."

How has the real-time Web already impacted nonprofit organizations or those focused on social impact work?
"One of the organizations I did an interview with was the American Red Cross. As they say, "at the Red Cross, the real-time web saves lives." Real-time information delivery has changed the way that organization works in radical ways. It's amazing. Disaster response work that used to take days now takes minutes, using a combination of Sharepoint, mobile devices and airplane surveillance. The Red Cross also pays very close attention to the rest of the real-time web, though. I was fascinated to find out that the team at HQ is full of fans of the Breaking News Online iPhone app."

What impacts are right around the corner?
Organizations that choose to do so are already able to run circles around the web using these real-time technologies. I expect that some will do so and many will not. It will be like the difference between organizations that developed an effective web or email presence early vs. those that did not.

"If organizations want to be relevant and effective, they will need to incorporate some elements of real-time information delivery into their work flow. Be that pushing real-time updates out to their websites and supporters, consuming updates on breaking news in their sector in real time, or collaborating remotely in real time. Using only the parts of the web that you must refresh for updates, when you remember to do so, be they email or web pages, will soon feel like putting your ear up to a tin can with a string connecting it to some other tin can far away.

"I don't mean to say that everything will be real time and you must always live in that flow, but I do believe it's fast becoming an essential form of engagement. Not just because everyone is doing it, either, but because it's really very useful."

How can nonprofits or social impact groups take advantage of the real-time Web?
"There are as many ways to take advantage of the real time web as there are to use the web in general. Here's one of my favorite stories though. Some time back I was doing a workshop for nonprofit communications people and one of the attendees worked for a women's advocacy organization. As a proof of concept, we took the RSS feed of the New York Times and filtered it for keywords related to her organization's areas of interests, I think we used Yahoo Pipes to filter, it might have been FeedRinse.com, but that's not hard to do in many different ways.

"Then we took the filtered RSS feed and we ran it through an RSS to SMS/IM alert service. I use Notify.me a lot but even faster than that now is an iPhone app called Notifications. Or have your team's geeks check out Superfeedr.com. So the idea was, this person could then watch the NYT feed automatically, get an SMS or IM alert whenever a relevant story was published and then she could call up her local newspaper or other press.

"'I don't know if you've heard about this story breaking on a national level,' she could say, and of course they probably hadn't because they don't have robots watching for these things automatically, 'but if you'd like to cover this topic on a local level, our Executive Director is an excellent source for information.' That journalist will love you for it. Do that enough times and your organization, no matter how small, will have a chance to grow its public profile substantially.

"That's just one idea. There are countless other ways that real-time information delivery can be leveraged by nonprofits. From live video to live updates to live collaboration, more and more experiences online are going on in real time."

Our report, "The Real-Time Web and its Future", includes case studies, profiles, sector overviews and more. Find out more, and download a sneak peak, here.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

Update: Our original reporting was based on the increased speed we and other bloggers noticed yesterday. We have now received confirmation from a Google spokesperson that our informed guess was indeed correct. Google will post an update about this news in the next few days. We have updated this post to reflect this new development.

From Slow to Real Time

Bloggers and readers started to complain about Google Reader's delays shortly after Google launched the service in its current form, but until today, Google hadn't really done anything to address these complaints.

Google began to publish real-time feeds for shared Google Reader items in August 2009. Until now, however, Google did not consume the real-time updates from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds, even though most of Google's own blogs and FeedBurner now publish in real time. Google's App Engine, too, offers support for PubSubHubbub and some of the most popular real-time notifications bots are hosted on App Engine.

It's important to note that these real-time updates (assuming our observations and those from other bloggers turn out to be true) will only work for PubSubHubbub-enabled blogs. One of the major problem with Google Reader is that it pings relatively obscure feeds very infrequently and this won't change anytime soon if these feeds don't support real-time updates yet.

How to Enable PubSubHubbub on Your Blog

If you use WordPress and want to enable PubSubHubbub on your own blog, you can do so by installing the PubSubHubbub Wodpress plugin. By default, every blog on Blogger and Posterous already supports PubSubHubbub. Update: we mistakenly reported that WordPress.com blogs use the PubSubHubbub protocol, but WordPress.com actually uses the rssCloud format, which Google doesn't currently support.

If you're using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds, you can also turn on Google's PingShot service and sent out PubSubHubbub announcements in real time.

Twitter-Style Ads and Vertical Searches

In addition to this update, OneRiot now also offers developers new tools to filter search results for vertical searches such as news, videos and images, as well as for niche searches that only return results about topics like gadgets, politics and music.

Given that virtually all of OneRiot's growth and traffic dependents on keeping its partners happy, these updates are an important step for OneRiot. In this same context, it's also an important move for OneRiot to offer Twitter-optimized results. The company already offers a wide variety of advertising solutions, but for Twitter developers, being able to just plug these new ads into their products will surely prove to be very helpful.

We spoke with David Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, this morning about the different ways people are using the Internet, how this has changed from the old model and how Gigya can help.View image

The big change he's seen recently, he told us, is the concept of the feed as the center of our online interaction. We spend more time letting information passively approach us, by way of our friends, than actively searching for it. At the same time, by the very nature of the "feed", we share information for our friends to see, who see it as part of their feed.

"Consumers have transitioned or added on top of email the idea of a feed," he told us.

Yovanno said that Gigya has been working with Microsoft recently on its social strategy and he expects to see Microsoft's take on a feed interface in the near future.

Gigya recently changed its direction to focus primarily on social media and interaction, so it's betting on the fact that the feed will become ever more important in driving traffic.

Social Media Is The New Search

"Social media is representing a larger and larger mix of traffic compared to search," Yovanno said. "Sites are starting to wake up to the fact that they need to make some of those same level of investments in social as they did for search."

Whereas search engine optimization was the primary focus of sites in search of traffic, many are now realizing that social interaction is quickly becoming a driving force.

What Gigya provides to this end is a way to not only let users login to a website using a number of different social media identities, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Facebook Connect, but also to create content that will be seen on those sites' feeds without ever leaving the website they're on.

A simple example of this can be seen on this article. If you log in using Facebook Connect to leave a comment, after you enter the comment and click "Send" a little window will pop up allowing you to share your comment in your Facebook feed.

Gigya 4 - The New Features

Gigya allows users to sign into a website using a number of different social identities, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and OpenID in more than 20 different languages. One they're logged in, Gigya also provides a number of on-site widgets to allow for interaction and sharing, from inviting friends from other social media sites to chatting to sharing content in an off-site stream. Then, after everything is said and done, Gigya's new social optimization platform provides you with analytics on how users are interacting with your content, other users, and their social networks.

"Our business, at the core, is a technology of connectivity," Yovanno explained. "We create an abstract layer on top of Facebook Connect, LinkedIn's open platform, Twitter ... and we give a website a single API to write to."

The provision of a so-called "super API" is clutch to the emerging social network atmosphere we find ourselves in today.

Yovanno pointed out that there are a number of networks available and, even though Facebook is the leading social network, it entirely depends on the audience for what network will be the most popular when users are given a choice. The more choices a website offers, the more likely a user will chose to log in using their social identity and therefor be able to share information about the site on their feed.

The "super API", then, is key to providing as many login options as possible without having to constantly keep up with changing requirements from an ever-growing number of social networks.

Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your "one true login", as services like Gigya will make sure that you'll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya's gamble will ultimately pay off.

Will these Status Updates be Useful?

Starting today, updates from MySpace users will appear in Google's real-time search results on the default search results page. Users will also be able to see these updates by selecting the latest and updates mode in Google's search options bar.

On average, MySpace users don't tend to share as many links as Twitter users, so it remains to be seen how useful these MySpace status updates will be for Google users. For now, Google doesn't offer its users the ability to filter real-time searches by source.

We got in touch with Google this morning and a spokesman confirmed that the feature is indeed part of a series of experiments the company has been running since early this month.

Image thanks to Joe Hobot.

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found [here].

Google last redesigned its news page last May, adding more visual content to the layout. This time around, we expect to see more in the way of real-time content, including features such as the trending topics seen here.

If you keep a close watch, it is possible you will see other new features that Google is testing, but as the company's blog post points out, often these features will show up and go completely unnoticed. In Hobot's case, the trending topics showed up for a brief period before disappearing again.

We asked about the specifics of the new feature, but Gaither said that statement included above is all the company is saying about it at this time.