Here is a small selection of the issues that were raised about the current state of the real-time web:

How do we know a user is credible? On the real-time web, we are obviously looking for speed, but that speed obviously comes at a cost. While traditional search engines can rely on PageRank-type algorithms that can give us an idea that a source is credibly and trusted, the real-time web's focus on speed makes this highly impractical. Once we start filtering data, we automatically lose some of the real-time aspects.

Are we trading in freshness for quality? Is quicker really always better and is less really more? After all, how often is the instant timeliness of the real-time web actually really useful?

How can we filter the real-time web? How, for example, can we filter out the most boring people (even though there is social pressure to follow all your friends)? How can we find the most interesting stories? And how can we weed out spam?

Even though many questions were asked about the real-time web and even though many questions remain to be answered, it doesn't come as a surprise that the overall feeling was that the real-time web will soon be a normal part of everybody's experience of the Internet. Now, all we need to figure out how we can extract the most value out of it without being completely overwhelmed by information overload, getting spammed by scammers, or bored to death by those of our friends who feel the need to tweet about what they had for breakfast.

What Do You Hate About the Real-Time Web?

What questions around the real-time web do you think still need to be answered? What is it that bothers you about the real-time web?

Out of the two announcements, the payment services service are the most interesting. Amazon gives its customers two options: Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Simple Pay. Simply Pay is basically a stripped-down version of the full Checkout package and doesn't include the one-click checkout and most of the order management features such as calculating sales tax and shipping rates, creating packing slips, or collecting buyer feedback. Simple Pay, on the other hand, allows sellers to use more payment options, including credit cards and bank accounts. Checkout by Amazon can only accept credit cards.

These services are basically an extension of Amazon's "Flexible Payment Service." This service (which has been in beta for quite a while now) gives developers a set of API that hook into Amazon's payment services. One area that Amazon is especially targeting with this is micro-payments.

With these new services, Amazon is going up against Google Checkout, as well as most credit card merchant accounts. However, with Amazon's already established reach among consumers, as well as the level of trust that most consumers have when it comes to working with Amazon, both Checkout and Simple Pay have a distinct advantage over their competition. For merchants, Amazon's Checkout service also offers a wider range of services than most credit card processors or Google Checkout currently offer. Google Checkout, however, is generally cheaper than Amazon's offerings - though it also offers fewer services.

Streamlined Mechanical Turk

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is basically a way to outsource menial tasks that would be too computing intensive or simply need human intelligence to be completed (Amazon calls them "Human Intelligence Tasks"). Applications reach from tagging photos to rewriting trivia questions, or digging a particular story.

With this latest update, 'requesters', as Amazon calls them, can look forward to a simpler user interface that will guide them through the process more effectively. Amazon has also created a set of more efficient tools to track and monitor the work that is being done.

In addition to rating quotes on credibility and relevance to the reader (because relevance is so subjective, that makes it the less useful of the two metrics), users can also post challenging or supporting statements. In that respect, Ameritocracy is something like a crowdsourced version of Annenberg's FactCheck.org. Users can also add context to quotes and discuss and debate quotes via a comment system.

According to the About page on the site, its goal is to "help people cut through the noise and gain quick access to the whole picture." When we asked Kennedy if taking quotes out of context really helped reveal the full picture or just presented an even more limited view, he told us that "whole picture" was probably not the best term to use to describe what the site does. "Our intent is that the short quotes, short user responses (Supporting, Challenging, and Adding Context), and the ratings make it far more efficient for people to get a broader view," he said. "The quote should be enough in-context that it captures the speaker's intent. If not, the community can flag the quote as being Out of Context, and the contributing user will take a reputation hit."

Ameritocracy is attempting to create a non-partisan community that keeps the focus on fact checking and credibility and not on political ideology. We like the idea of Ameritocracy. Giving people a way to rate the credibility of political information or statements and challenge facts publicly helps to level the playing field and keep politicians, organizations, and the media honest.

If you're interested in participating at Ameritocracy, you can sign up with the invite code "readwrite" -- there are 100 invites available on a first come, first serve basis.