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Research in Motion has just held its earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, and the news doesn't look too great.

"Fiscal 2012 has gotten off to a challenging start," said Jim Balsillie, RIM's Co-CEO. "The slowdown we saw in the first quarter is continuing into Q2, and delays in new product introductions into the very late part of August is leading to a lower than expected outlook in the second quarter."

Realtidbits is the model of the new startup. It did not start with the Web site. It started with an API. That's representative of a new trend. You don't launch a Web site anymore. You go straight to the API and create a service.

The API represents what Sam Rami of Apigee compares to the evolution of the 20th century supply chain. In the post-war economy, the supply chain changed our geographies. It transformed how we delivered goods to the market. With the advent of the modern highway, we created hubs that connected transportation systems which converged at central points. Through this we saw the emergence of a new commerce based culture.

Khris Loux and his company, Echo, have always had a tentative relationship with the lowly blog comment. Echo launched in 2009, described as a "blog commenting platform" much like Disqus. Right from the beginning, however, Echo went beyond the comment and aggregated all sorts of real-time data from around the Web to pull into the section normally reserved for comments. Now, Echo has gone beyond declaring the death of the comment and re-launched as a "real-time as a service" platform.

At its re-launch event today, the company brought out the big guns to show off just how useful it thinks its new incarnation will be. We got a chance to talk with them beforehand to go beneath a bit of the flashiness and we got a glimpse of a service that adds a new building block onto the Web and could bring the real-time Web to previously untouched corners of the Internet.

It was just a year ago that Khris Loux - then CEO of JS-Kit - declared the "death of the comment" at the hand of websites like Twitter and Flickr, announcing his venture with Echo. Today, it looks like Loux has changed his tune as Echo is announcing its real-time recent comments widget, a simple add-on that brings real-time, dynamic content to static webpages.

We have to wonder, however, if everything should go real-time, or if some things should be kept on a delay.

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series, below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009.

You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year.

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux sees the Internet as a digital brain, a network of nodes and synapses firing signals through pathways in relays of ever-increasing speed and intelligence.

At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, he talked to us about how the synaptic web, as he calls it, relies on real-time communication and distributed networking to tie together our communal body of online knowledge. In this interview, Loux talks about the new school of online reputation management, the essence of distributed social networks, and how the synaptic web shapes and heals itself as users collectively contribute to the dataset.

Whether you're riffing on the latest celebrity gossip or ranting about local politics, Blogged lets you add your two cents to today's hottest news posts. As of this morning, the conversation tracking service is offering another level of news-related discussion through its live chat feature. In addition to aggregating topical blog posts and real-time blog comments, Blogged lets you find your online friends and create article-specific or topic-specific chat boxes. If you're like me and you have a knack for putting your foot in your mouth, this chat feature helps ensure that your buffoonery is kept amongst your inner circle.

After publishing her book about social capital and the power of social networking,The Whuffie Factor, Tara Hunt is doing what any change agent does. She's changing. She's quit her job, purchased a winnebago and coerced five friends to karaoke across the country with her. Wuffaoke Or Bust is a cross-country road trip where six crooners and one pug will live stream their 13-city karaoke tour from San Francisco to Montreal. Think of it as a Rental Car Rally with a talent competition or Bullrun Rally with geeks instead of "petrolsexuals."

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.