ReadWriteWeb

Parsing real-time information that streams down a screen as a list of short text updates isn't easy. Thanks to two new visualization tools from PostRank, however, the company's users can now use PostRank's new entity extraction feature to see real-time updates in your stream on a map and through a tree map interface. These two new features will be available to developers through Postrank's real-time API. You can also find demos of PostRanks real-time geo and entity trends here and here.

We've entered an era where the cost of sensors, processors and transmitters are so low that it's fast becoming cost effective to put them inside everything, even the clothes we wear. Even our own toothbrush may soon sense and communicate socially about where it is and how it's being used in space and time. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has coined the term "spime", to describe objects that can be "tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object."

David Orban, one of the founders of WideTag, the creator of the iPhone app WideNoise, also offers WideSpime, which helps developers build mass data collection services for real-time data management in a way that maintains the autonomy of both the data and the object generating the data.

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.

Twitter has just announced a number of partnerships with a companies engaged in "real-time search and discovery". According to the blog post, the company is "happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery."

This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter's current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.

One month ago Google unveiled five big new technologies in one day - and then launched real-time search that afternoon. One of those five was something called Near Me Now, and it just went live moments ago.

The feature lets Google grab your geographic location and display restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATM machines and more in your immediate vicinity. It's available today for both iPhone and Android users. It's enough to make a person bookmark Google.com, instead of just Googling through the browser search bar.

Don't worry, it's not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we've chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year's big trends: the real-time web.

Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web.

Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009, due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company, as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers.

This Monday we're releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future. You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200.

One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden, a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he's doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings.

Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF).

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation.

However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized.