ReadWriteWeb

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.

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.

Over 97% of all searches on real-time search engine and infrastructure provider OneRiot are now driven by the company's partners who use OneRiot's API to serve real-time search results. Today, OneRiot is announcing the next version of its API, which - among other things - gives content owners the ability to create real-time search engines for their domains and sites. The new API will also allow developers to integrate OneRiot's real-time ads with the search results. OneRiot is also introducing a new ad format for Twitter apps. These ads are limited to 140 characters and include shortened URLs.

During my career as a Web strategy consultant I've often had people ask me, "How do I do social media?" Unfortunately the answer isn't simple. But the first step is the same as if you developing any other marketing strategy: know your market. To "know your market" in the old days you needed a $15,000 qualitative market research study that would then need to be quantified for the likes of senior management. The customer research effort was time consuming and expensive.

Luckily the Web offers many ways to gather information on a topic and the conversation around that particular topic or product, in real-time. In fact we are spoiled, even overwhelmed, with free listening tools.

Real-Time search engine OneRiot just announced that its advertising network RiotWise is now open to all developers. RiotWise is OneRiot's attempt to monetize real-time streams by focusing on trending topics and giving advertisers the opportunity to highlight their own content in these streams or through regular banner ads. The private beta of RiotWise began in October 2009 and the company has steadily opened up the service to more developers. Starting today, any developer who wants to implement OneRiot in an app can do so.

OneRiot, one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot's partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user's stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby, for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users' streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot's API, developers are free to use them in whatever way they see fit.

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.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze a list of the most influential websites in the world, look back on the past decade of e-commerce, suggest a list of products that Twitter might like to acquire, review a collection of Thanksgiving web apps, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Also read on for a special offer on our next premium report, which we're releasing this Monday!

Having just launched a new real-time mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot only weeks ago, mobile search company Taptu is now expanding their revamped service to the Android platform. Today, they're launching a new application designed specifically for Android phones running version 1.5 and above. Like their brand-new mobile website, Taptu for Android includes real-time search results thanks to OneRiot integration. It also offers a touchscreen interface for viewing the results without having to pinch, resize, or refocus the screen.