If you try to keep up with the evolution of the internet (and I do), you’ve probably heard some talk that the “Real-Time Web” is the Next Big Thing. It’s come up most often in reference to Twitter,* but there’s a lot more to the discussion than just Twitter.
What follows is a basic primer on the topic.
What We Mean When We Say “Real-Time” and Why It’s Important
ReadWriteWeb provides excellent summary of the Real-Time Web in 100 words.
“The Real-Time Web is a paradigm based on pushing information to users as soon as it’s available—instead of requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates. It can be enabled in many different ways and can require a different technical architecture. It’s being implemented in social networking, search, news and elsewhere—making those experiences more like instant messaging and facilitating unpredictable innovations. Early benefits include increased user engagement (“flow”) and decreased server loads, but these are the early days. Real-time information delivery will likely become ubiquitous, a requirement for almost any website or service.”
That was fun.
Who Are the Players?
What follows is by no means exhaustive as anyone that publishes a status update or blog post is involved in the Real-Time Web. It’s just a quick overview of who’s who in this space right now at the meta level.
The Companies
Twitter is the clear leader in this space right now. Whenever something big happens around the world, Twitter springs to life with tweets and hash tags discussing the event. From the death of Michael Jackson to the protests following the contested Iranian election (or most recently, balloon boy), Twitter has become a central hub for discussion of what’s going on right now.
Twitter’s “trending topics” provide an interesting snapshot of the internet’s zeitgeist. It’s occasionally gamed by promotions, and every trending topic eventually gets overrun by spam, but it’s still an interesting glimpse into the net’s collective mind.
For whatever reason for the past year or so, where Twitter goes, Facebook follows, so their news feed now looks like a souped up version of a tweet stream. IT does go beyond simple status and includes updates from Facebook applications and other 3rd party services (including Twitter itself,) but the clear goal was to replicate the river of information that Twitter users had found so addictive. They’ve also begun to expose more of this information to the internet at large.
Google/Microsoft
These two companies rule “traditional” search now—assuming the Microhoo! partnership is allowed to go through, of course. Both are thinking about and experimenting with the Real-Time Web in a big way.
Bing looks ready to launch a Twitter search engine. They’ve apparently inked a deal with Microsoft and the first Bing result for a search on Bing Twitter points to an interesting URL (www.bing.com/twitter NOW LIVE).
I can’t imagine Google will be very far behind them in terms of rolling out some real-time options.
And that’s just the beginning. It will be fascinating to see how the established search players react to this desire for up-to-the-second information.
One way both Bing and Google are participating right now is with the publication of hot, current topics. Bing publishes them on their home page and Google has the very popular trends website and iGoogle gadget.
The Technologies
Two competing technologies, PubSubHubbub and RSSCloud are looking to bring the power of the Real-Time Web to every publisher.
While the nuts and bolts of the two technologies are of real interest to many folks and are actively debated, the only thing most people need to know is that both technologies are designed to bring instantaneous updates to anyone who publishes content on the web. Currently, when a site (like this one) publishes content, it’s up to the client (a feed reader or a dashboard like the Yahoo! homepage or iGoogle) to find out when it has been updated. To do this it uses a technique called polling where the client asks, at some specified interval, whether or not the resource is updated. This interval is generally set to happen every few minutes, but in some cases it can lag by an hour or more.
That’s not exactly fresh.
These two new technologies flip that relationship on its head. Instead of having clients continually ask the question “is this feed updated?” these protocols feature a central hub that sends messages to all subscribing clients alerting them whenever there’s new content.
One way to visualize it is to imagine the difference between calling your local police department every hour to see if there’s anything wrong in town versus the “reverse 911” systems in many communities that allow authorities to broadcast information to local residents.
Here Now
If you use Google’s Feedburner service (as we do here at AWiderNet), PubSubHubbub is already available to you. From the Publicize tab in your feed, ensure the PingShot feature is enabled, and you’ve joined the party. Isn’t leading edge fun?
Similarly, Wordpress.com has enabled RSSCloud support for the over 7.5 million blogs it hosts.
Back to the Future
For those of you who have been working on the web as long as I have, you’ll be amused to notice that some folks use PuSH as shorthand for PUbSubHubbub. Party like it’s 1997.
Killing Google?
There’s a tremendous amount of hype about the Real-time Web right now, and while I clearly see its promise and power, I have to shake my head a little bit at some of the predictions.
As the #iranelection event proved, there is great power in the ability to follow events as they happen. Pulling information from various sources, including people on the streets of Tehran, allowed the world an incredible glimpse into the tumultuous days following the contested election.
The part that’s overlooked in the hype for the promise of the Real-Time Web is that in the weeks and months following the events, we’ve continued to follow the story. And as the seriousness of the subject deserves, we’ve needed to explore the incident in great depth—depth that the real-time menagerie of tweets, status updates and camera phone pictures can’t possibly provide.
Even during the height of the protests where the media was breathlessly reporting on (and piggybacking on) the power of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, I needed to escape from the fire hose to get a proper understanding of the events.
A specific example of that was the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman murdered during the protests. Her death was captured on video and the footage quickly spread virally across the web. Her tragic death made “Neda” (a word meaning “voice” or “message” in Persian) a rallying cry for the protesters. Watching the #iranelection tweet stream, I knew #neda was something important. I couldn’t piece together what from the disparate threads.
So, what did I do? I turned to Google to search for more in-depth information on the subject. Which means for the real depth that I need to adequately understand the world around me, I needed to turn to the crawl/search paradigm that Real-Time is supposed to supplant. That’s going to remain true for a lot of subjects.
None of which discounts the power of the Real-Time Web. It just should serve to temper the typical overhyped reaction that the blogs and technology press applies to anything “new.” Sometimes the playing field really is changed fundamentally, other times nothing much happens at all (see, “Push,” the first time around.) Only time will tell where the Real-Time Web will end up on that spectrum. The important thing to remember is that wherever it ends up, it’s something to be cognizant of as it grows.
And really, it’s already changed the web for the better, so even if it never does anything more than nestle in alongside traditional searches, that’s still a significant addition to the way we share and process information on the net.
*Twitter? Me? Yes. @robreact
Tags: bing, facebook, google, real-time-web, twitter
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