ReadWriteWeb

At last year's Microsoft PDC, Seesmic announced that it was working on a major Silverlight-based rewrite of its desktop clients for Windows and Mac. After almost a year of development, the company just launched the final version of Seesmic Desktop 2. While it was still possible to describe Seesmic Desktop as a social networking client until today, the new version clearly aims to be far more than that. Thanks to a new plugin architecture and marketplace, you can now also use the application to track breaking news on TechMeme, listen to music on Last.fm and browse your news feeds with the help of the Google Reader plugin. In essence, Seesmic Desktop is now a platform for all things real time.

Until recently, iPhone location app designs were limited by the constraints of single-tasked OS capabilities: launch Foursquare and check-in, use Yelp find a nearby place of interest, open another app to update your status and tag it with location.

All of these scenarios require users to have a participatory role in publishing and sharing. This works well for some apps that require active engagement such as broadcasting your Twitter status and where you'll be later. But an entirely new class of compelling scenarios really shine when you use a technology called geofencing to leverage background location and push location updates up to public and private clouds.

How do you get your users to interact with each other? That's a question Envolve, a new Facebook-like chat feature for websites, is trying to solve. While we have seen a number of similar services in the past, Envolve is one of the best website chat tools we have seen so far. While most sites now give users the ability to comment on blog posts or review products, website chats like Envolve offer a far more interactive experience by allowing users to chat with each other in real time.

In the wake of the BP oil disaster, real-time mapping technologies have been recruited to improve communication and promote collaboration between people in local communities, as well as federal, state and local responders. Last week NOAA released GeoPlatform.gov to provide near-real-time mapping data to those connected to the crisis.

The site lets you track everything from daily spill positions to the locations of ships responding to the crisis. State and non-governmental organizations are also collecting and mapping real-time information. In some instances the efforts include citizen-generated data from iPhone apps and photos mapped on sites like Flickr.

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.

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It's almost like an ocean where there's no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it's always raining in it. The rain is the new content that's added into the ocean.

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.

Google is developing a system to ingest real-time content updates from any page on the web automatically, using the open PubSubHubbub Atom protocol, we reported on Wednesday.

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?

Last September, Wordpress made millions of its blogs real-time with RSSCloud, but today it has taken real-time a step further

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.

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations.

The days of SEO as the primary traffic driver to your website are over. Don't get us wrong, organic search engine optimization isn't about to disappear as a key traffic driver. And thankfully, Google AdWords is still going strong. However, recent technology trends enable a brave new world of marketing. Ignore them at your peril.

Take real-time, for instance. The next generation of search, aggregation, notification and findability services are being developed using real-time technologies that enable users and machines to receive real-time updates. In a recent post, Robert Scoble said he would be better off curating news than actually attending the Apple launch! What? If you aren't thinking about how real time, along with social networks, mobile and location-based services fits in your marketing plan, you're missing an opportunity.