ReadWriteWeb

Not long ago John Schwarz, an executive board member at SAP, sat down for a video interview about the current state and future goals of the enterprise software giant's popular BusinessObjects BI and analytics platform, which Schwarz is in charge of.

The discussion was wide-ranging, but a key statement buried in all the talk about BusinessObjects was an admission that real-time access to analytics was vital for the future of the enterprise. If the future of the consumer Web is real-time streams of information and communication channels, then what will keep businesses caught up will be tools to analyze and iterate just as quickly. For an absolute leviathan in the B2B space, this is a huge acknowledgment.

Hype cycles, like all cycles, are getting shorter. People want to be the first to say, "You heard it here first, folks: this or that hot thing you hear about all the time is a bunch of hot air."

We love to debunk myths and prick bubbles as much as the next set of pundits, but we think the real-time Web is for real. Financial traders have lived in a real-time world for a while, but only within the confines of the trading floor. When they left work, they entered a batch world. Most other people work in a batch world. That is changing. We are all entering the real-time world of the trader. Some of us are getting there faster, but we are all heading there. And relax, there is an "Off" button!

At its peak, a search for "Iran" on Twitter generated over 100,000 tweets per day and over 8,000 tweets per hour. The plot just below shows the growth in volume of information in the number of tweets per hour.

How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?

Appealing to users' laziness is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, you risk offending users who like to think of themselves as essentially industrious, on-top-of-it, finger-on-the-pulse go-getters.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? We love being lazy, and if your app will allow for ever more user laziness, well, that's just what we call "driving innovation," now isn't it? For those of us who are too lazy for RSS feeds but still in the market for real-time, personalized blog searches, we recommend checking out LazyFeed. We've got invites, too; just keep reading.

Today, Facebook is launching a new feature for webmasters to post a stream of relevant Facebook updates in real time.

The new feature, called a Live Stream Box, can run on sites "next to live streaming videos of concerts, speeches, sporting events, webcasts, TV shows, presentations, or webinars," according to an announcement we received via email. "Sites can also run the Live Stream Box in multi-player games or with any other experience where many people are visiting a website at the same time."

Some people say that "the real-time web" could be the next generation of post-Google search. Social media tools have greatly increased not just the number of people posting content online but also the speed with which they are able to do so. Do we need a new search paradigm that prioritizes publishing freshness higher than page rank?

Google backers say that Google is already capable of indexing anything online mere moments after it's been published - but the user experience in search doesn't really feel "real time" right now. Movable Type consultant Mark Carey came up with a simple solution this weekend that could change your use of Google more than anything else has in a while.

EtherPad is not likely to win a prize for its user interface design, but it may just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on your co-workers' screens in real-time.

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.

EtherPad is not likely to win a price for its user interface design, but it might just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on your co-workers' screens in real-time.

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.

Google is announcing this morning that after more than a year of work on the problem, Google Finance is now offering real-time price quotes for any stock traded on NASDAQ.

As Henry Blodget points out at Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo! Finance has had real time quotes for a while now and the companies appear to be engaged in some minor squabbling about who's real time quotes are more real time. That's a secondary, albeit important, matter as far as we're concerned. Of more general interest is the increasing availability of and user expectation for real time information on the web.