That's a huge coup for Foursquare and a sign the startup will likely put a major new focus on working with outside companies and services to build on top of the set of check-ins and tips it's amassing about venues around the world, people who patronize them and their interests. The social software developer ecosystem could really use a strong show of support, after Twitter's recent moves have left many independent developers feeling burned.

The Foursquare Application Development Interface has been relatively underutilized to date. It's a sound bet that the man who managed integration of Twitter search and much more into one of the biggest shifts in Google's history (going real time) is going to throw serious fuel on the fire of the location service's platform next. Patil also worked on and announced the real-time-ification of Google Blogsearch in 2009. Business Insider saw today's announcement about his move first, though that outlet didn't have much to say about it.

Foursquare launched a radically new version of its mobile app earlier this month that included an ambitious and very well executed new recommendations feature. The service remains relatively small in its number of users, but it's innovative far out of proportion and deeply inspiring to geeks and business owners small and large.

If Patil can bring some real-time savvy, some big-platform development skills and some Google-scale industry contacts to the Foursquare platform, some very big things could happen.

Skepticism abounds, however, about the long-term developer-friendliness of super-hot venture-funded startups-as-platforms.

"The controversy around the changes in Twitter's relationship with third-party developers has made it much harder to lure startups onto platforms like Foursquare's," says leading social data developer and ReadWriteWeb contributor Pete Warden. "By bringing in such a heavy-hitter, the company is showing how serious it is about overcoming that reluctance."

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.

We know that a lot of you follow us on Twitter or are our Facebook fans, and sometimes the constant streams of blog posts and observations can be as impersonal as they are informative or interesting.

We've decided that the last thing we need to do with Buzz is use it to promote the same stream of blog content - we're not that desperate, and we know you get that news elsewhere. Here's how we're using Google Buzz instead.

We'll ask questions or give opinions there from time to time each day, and we do hope you'll join us for some friendly debate and fresh perspectives in a real-time setting. We've certainly had fun with it, ourselves, already.

You can also choose to add our blog posts to your Google Buzz stream by choosing Buzz from the Add This widget at the bottom of each post. It looks like this:

But we won't be cluttering up our own Buzz stream with bot-like aggregations and self-promotion. As we've said, if you want to get RWW news, there are many other platforms well-suited to that.

Let us know what you think in the comments, or just pop over to the Buzz account and tell us all about it.

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.

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.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social Web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right, and that Facebook, the world's dominant social-media-stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

The Problem With Facebook's Group Support

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream, and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs. Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

Tweetdeck's Superior Handling of Groups

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.




• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications - why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?



• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.



• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.



• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a group that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended to connect with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Using only HTML5 and Javascript, the service syncs your browser window with the browsers of viewers whether they're using IE6, Chrome, an iPhone or almost anything else. Transitions between images are super-fast and the service is a joy to use. It doesn't include things like markup or native voice support (you'll have to get on the phone) but for $15 per month, we think it looks like a great deal.

We've found very few shortcomings in our testing of the app so far and ReadWriteWeb's own designer Jared Smith enjoyed using it a lot. "It demonstrates an awesome use of standard technologies and real-time technologies," he says. Existing powerpoint decks will need to be exported as images and uploaded one at a time, but the company says it's working on changing that.

My favorite part of Black Tonic is the iPhone Safari view. Even when we switched from broadcast mode to review mode, where I was able to scroll through all the images in the presentation and click to zoom in a light-box - the whole experience worked very quickly on my iPhone. All I had to do was load a simple URL and we were rolling. (This is going to be a lot of fun to watch on an iPad.)

The company explained what it calls FLOW, its DOMcasting technology, in a blog post this summer. Presenting from Chrome works wonderfully. Presenting from Firefox is a little slower as Black Tonic is javascript-heavy, but it's still not bad at all. Watching a presentation in Firefox is no problem at all.

As we wrote in the profile of the then-unlaunched Black Tonic in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future:

The Black Tonic team believes that lightweight real-time technology is an opportunity to reconsider remote presentations, to add some structure to them and add the necessary control over presentation that they haven't had with the workaround of emailing PDFs.

A whole lot of options arise when a new computing paradigm emerges. Real-time doesn't have to only mean delivering a chaotic stream of social information to an individual at the center of the system. Black Tonic is a good example of looking outside the standard application of a new technology and instead taking advantage of the opportunity to reconsider standard practices [like emailing PDFs to design clients] that have been influenced by technological limitations that no longer exist.

Black Tonic is available today and includes a two-week free trial.

One of the greatest concerns folks in the audience had is how to deal with negativity - bad-review-type blog posts, angry tweets, disparaging comments, etc. - in an environment that's instant, viral, noisy and difficult to control. While each of the panelists had their own answers, I'd like to ask our readers: How do you handle being smacked down, called out or criticized in a real-time web environment?

But knee-jerk reactions aren't always the best way to deal with negativity.

Toeman's comment about the real-time web is interesting and insightful. "Where there's smoke, there's sometimes fire," he said. "And sometimes, it's just smoke." Responding to every negative comment can sometimes create a legitimate "fire" in a situation where not responding would allow the (non)event to blow over.

Two fellows in the audience today asked how to deal with negative blog comments, either on one's own (or one's company's) blog or on a third-party site. Since I've been spending more time reading our own comment threads - and interacting with readers that way - my immediate response is that one of the best ways to deal with negative comments is to leave them there and let them go without comment. Almost without fail, friends or fans will come to the defense of the product or idea being discussed without the brand or author having to do anything about it. That's just the nature of community.

We all on the panel seemed to agree that often, learning to ignore unwarranted negativity can be a blessing, but it's a learned skill that takes time and patience. The virtue of not reacting is one that most of us have had to learn the hard way after being tormented by the big, mean Internet, spinning our wheels and expending our social capital to fight battles we cannot win. Communicating this learned patience to clients and less experienced users is an important part of what true social media experts ought to be doing; in addition to encouraging dialog, we have to let others know that it's sometimes ok to ignore negativity and remain respectfully silent.

The old adage "don't feed the trolls" was admirably updated by Zisk, who said, "Don't feed the trolls, unless you're feeding them tranquilizers." He said that often, angry people simply want to be heard and acknowledged; any attempt at self-defense or debate on the part of the brand or post author will simply escalate the negativity.

Another point where the three of us saw eye-to-eye is that age, experience and patience are great virtues, even in a fast-paced, real-time environment. Being able to predict which negative signals will dissolve into the ether and knowing which real issues need to be address, understanding different real-time community's audiences and attitudes and knowing how to use each channel or platform - these are things that almost no 22-year-old "social media expert" will be able to do.

What's your take on it? How do you personally deal with snipes, snarks or blatant attacks in real-time media channels? If you represent or advise brands, how do corporate communications change when real-time negative comments enter the conversation? Let us know in the comments.

Widgets can be created around any search term imaginable and customized in a number of ways. Results are automatically refreshed, just as they are on the Collecta site, and include results from blogs, microblogs, news feeds and photo sharing services.

Still, Facebook statuses encompass only a limited amount and type of information available on the real-time web. Collecta, on the other hand, boasts more than 10 million unique content sources, including Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, The Associated Press, CNN, and Reuters.

Customization options include the ability to choose one's search terms as well as the ability to customize the header, control the scroll rate and link to an external style sheet to integrate the widget with a website's existing look and feel.

You can see the widget in action as it powers the streaming results for MySpace's breaking news page that's focused on Haiti - or just check out the Real-Time Tech widget we've embedded below.

For more on Collecta and the evolving market, check out the ReadWriteWeb Collecta and Real-Time Search archives.

Some of the developers that have already implemented ads from OneRiot include the popular multi-service IM client Digsby and the BlackBerry Twitter client ÜberTwitter. Ads are delivered through OneRiot's API and developers have considerable freedom in how they use these ads.

For additional information about OneRiot's advertising network, also have a look at our earlier coverage here.

Real-Time Web Crawling in the Future?

Although only briefly mentioned in the post, Google hinted that they may begin looking into other mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub, an open protocol that provides near-instant notifications of change updates. No further details were provided beyond the one sentence, but the announcement clearly shows that Google has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the real-time web is the future. This is one trend the company isn't planning to ignore.

The real-time web, heavily influenced by the speed of Twitter and other other rapid-fire social networking updates, has created a desire among internet users for faster access to information. This desire has, in turn, led to the creation of new real-time protocols such as the above mentioned PubSubHubbub and its counterpart RSSCloud. If Google began to use these technologies for scanning the web, their search results wouldn't just be updated faster - they would be updated in real-time. That means information would become available in the search results listings as soon as it was published to the web.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine - most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google's search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat. However, Google is already doing this to some extent now. Over time, the PageRank algorithm has evolved and can now reward sites with fresher, more fitting content and rank them higher than sites with more links on some occasions. And if anyone can figure out the proper algorithm for mixing in real-time content and ranking it appropriately along with static pages, it's got to be Google. In fact, we'll probably soon see exactly how they plan on addressing this issue, when they incorporate Twitter search results into their index, as announced last week.

...But Until Then, Google Delivering Faster, Fresher Results Instead

Although the PubSubHubbub mention may have been the most exiting part of the announcement, real-time search results aren't here just yet. In the meantime, we have to just be content with sped up results instead. The post advises website owners who are blocking Google's search bot software known as Googlebot from crawling their RSS/Atom feeds to unblock it via their robots.txt file. If unsure, webmasters can test their feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools, as the post recommends.