Real-time information is red hot all around the web but it made a surprise appearance on YouTubetonight in the form of real-time search for comments, of all things. YouTube comments are notoriously not worth reading, but now you can search their full text...in real time. There are some very real, potential use-cases crying out for a tool like this. Companies in particular are likely to want to know what people are saying about their names in the comments on YouTube. You name your topic, though: it's now available for real-time search across viewer discussion.Real-time search appears to have been rolled out very recently, with no mention, on this page. In addition to search results continuously updated ala Facebook's newsfeed ("3 new results") there's also a frequently-updated list of "trending topics" on the search page.SponsorUnfortunately, there are no feeds being published to syndicate these search results into a reader off-site. The regular search on YouTube now has RSS feeds and Google Wonder Wheel data being published, so perhaps comment search will have feeds added soon as well.Proper nouns will likely be of interest to searchers watching YouTube comments. This could be a popular addition to the toolkits of social media watchers everywhere.What's the benefit of serving those results up in real time? For certain search queries you don't want to wait around to find out there's new results.What could be next? Presuming this feature is as real as it looks and goes live to the public soon, we'd love to see YouTube support something like the Salmon comment aggregation protocoland publish updates for this and other GData feeds through in a real-time syndication format.Thanks to Tikva Morowati for the tip. Tikva is the Community Platform Director for KGBWeb, a stealth startup made up of ex-Googlers and others in New York City that will likely make a splash among web-watchers later this year. Discuss
Microblogging represents the first wave in the enterprise. Now the questions is what represents the second wave and how adoption will occur.The issue of the second wave came back up again and again in "Applying The Real-Time Web in the Enterprise," at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit today.SponsorBut though the first wave has had its impact, the group has questions about how quick the adoption has been.Those that are adopting social technologies often already use tools like Twitter. For the uninitiated, the technology is a bit mystifying and since it is optional, the adoption is not as great as it could be. The answer is not to clone Twitter but to find the application that really works for the enterprise user. The gap goes beyond microblogging and into the general realm of social technologies. For instance, mashups arose as an example. A woman in human resources may not have any interest in creating a mashup. Her views may change if i is not presented as a mashup and if she is assisted by a business analyst or IT worker who is familiar with the technology.It's the people with the expertise who have in some ways always been using real-time technologies. IRC channels, for instance, were originally used by IT to keep updated about projects. It's a tool similar to instant messaging and activity streams of the real-time web, But it had pretty much been inaccessible to most business users. A new generation of user interfaces are changing this dynamic. Tools that had been inaccessible are now fashioned in a manner that users understand. People use the social web. They get the notion of the status update. The enterprise applications that have adopted this style are the technologies that get better use.Machine-to-machine technologies that integrate the social web may help close the gap. These are tools that people are required to use for projects. By adding a "people" element, social applications may have more use for the business person.Still, the real-time web can not be viewed only in terms of the office person working on their desktop.Such a large percentage of the workforce are out in the field. Their use of mobile devices for establishing geo-presence is an area that should further develop, especially with the continued adoption of smart phones. Discuss
If you've ever worked with an advocacy group, you understand how important it is to stretch your scarce resources. In the face of dwindling government grants, a looming recession, and the fear of losing your volunteers, the real-time web can be a boon in getting legislation passed. Today's ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summitattendees took time to discuss some of the cause-based tools that can help in this bubbling river of data. SponsorConsumers Unionemployees Tim Marvin and Gregory Foster work hard to ensure that consumers have access to a fair and safe marketplace. The organization lobbies government groups around issues of health care reform, product safety and ethical advertising. Nevertheless, a number of today's available advocacy tools fall flat. While organizations communicate with phone calls, videos, static sites, brochures, face-to-face lobbying and a spam-like email service called an "e-alert", only a few are utilizing the real-time web. Rather than insisting upon these traditional methods, the group discussed new ways to hack the law-making process. Below are some of our ideas:1.Real-Time Story Uploading:Voters can upload their stories via a microblogging service, tag it with a cause-related hashtag and geo-tag it to a specific constituency. From here the relevant representatives could be provided with a constituency feed and can search via the issues that affect them most. In this case, trending topics would indicate the most popular issues. 2. Legislator Meet and Greet:Similar to celebrity sightings on Twitter, users could Tweet when meeting their legislator and encourage nearby voters to come by and express their opinions. We call this "legis-stalking". 3. Legislative Activity Stream:While legislation is already being tracked via sites like Govtrack.us, there's no reason your friends shouldn't get your legislation-related activity stream and real-time commentary. From here machine-powered sentiment analysis could be used to show a politician's popularity and overall happiness amongst voters. 4.Tracker:Similar to Pivotal Labs' Tracker, consumer groups could collaborate on an issues-based project management tool. When representatives reveal their plans, each issue can be broken down into a smaller project with associated goals. If goals are verified by a specific percentage of voters, then the project is considered a success and reflects this percentage in real-time. If goals are left unfulfilled, then the project is considered a failure. From here a politician's overall success rate can also be calculated as a real-time reflection of effectiveness. We know these are just some of the ideas available with real-time activism. If you've got ideas on how organizations can better utilize the real-time web add your ideas in the comments below or in the event wiki. If you'd like to help Consumers Union build the tools we've discussed above email fostgr@consumer.orgDiscuss
We just spent a whole day talking about the real-time web a the RWW Real-Time Web Summit. While the general mood was obviously extremely upbeat, a few sessions at the conference also focused on some of the questions that still remain to be answered. Brizzly's Jason Shellen, for example, asked us what we hated about the real-time web, while Stinky Teddy's David Hardtkefocused on how we can make sure that information on the real-time web is credible.SponsorQuestions That Still Need to be Answered?Here is a small selection of the issues that were raised about the current state of the real-time web:How do we know a user is credible?On the real-time web, we are obviously looking for speed, but that speed obviously comes at a cost. While traditional search engines can rely on PageRank-type algorithms that can give us an idea that a source is credibly and trusted, the real-time web's focus on speed makes this highly impractical. Once we start filtering data, we automatically lose some of the real-time aspects.Are we trading in freshness for quality?Is quicker really always better and is less really more? After all, how often is the instant timeliness of the real-time web actually really useful? How can we filter the real-time web?How, for example, can we filter out the most boring people (even though there is social pressure to follow all your friends)? How can we find the most interesting stories? And how can we weed out spam? Even though many questions were asked about the real-time web and even though many questions remain to be answered, it doesn't come as a surprise that the overall feeling was that the real-time web will soon be a normal part of everybody's experience of the Internet. Now, all we need to figure out how we can extract the most value out of it without being completely overwhelmed by information overload, getting spammed by scammers, or bored to death by those of our friends who feel the need to tweet about what they had for breakfast.What Do You Hate About the Real-Time Web?What questions around the real-time web do you think still need to be answered? What is it that bothers you about the real-time web?Discuss
Six Apart's Leah Culveris one smart cookie.At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, she chatted with Jolie O'Dell about Comet, XMPP, and the languages and protocols that are making the real-time web doable, as well as the challenges of developing for real-time environments.SponsorDiscuss
What does your blog have in common with CNN, the Wall St. Journal and the White House? You probably publish your updates to Twitter using Twitterfeed, just like those organizations do. Starting today if you publish on Blogger, Typepad or another publishing system that offers PubSubHubbubfeeds Twitterfeed will subscribe and push your new posts to Twitter in a matter of moments.That's not the only change going live, either. Publishing to Facebook? Check. An improved que management system for greater reliability? Check. Integration with Google Analytics? Check!SponsorEarlier this afternoon Twitterfeed launched a new version of the service used by nearly 350,000 publishers. We caught up with the company at today's ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summitand got the low-down on the changes rolling out to all users over the next few days.Twitterfeed believes it will now be the biggest subscriber to PubSubHubbub feeds and aims to test the system's latency performance. No more 20 to 30 minute delays in publishing to Twitter if you're on a Pubsubhubbub-enabled publishing system.Publishing to Facebook will be a huge win for many of those publishers and integration with both Bit.lyand Google Analytics through the integration of UTMtags will allow publishers to compare audience response in Facebook and Twitter (among other things). Real-time, cross-network publishing and analytics as a service? That's pretty hot. With almost 350,000 publishers, Twitterfeed is approaching the number of publishers that FeedBurner had(430,000) when it was acquired by Google for a rumored $100 million. Like FeedBurner for the real-time web? That and more is what Twitterfeed could become if these kinds of technical developements could succeed.Discuss
No one is getting Web aggregation quite right. That's one of the big take-aways from "Web Aggregation: What Works, What Doesn't," one of the breakout sessions at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.We first heard about the fire hose meme several years ago in discussions about RSS. It was often used as a way to describe how information comes to you in a feed. The context has changed as real-time data becomes pervasive, and the questions about its volume persists.SponsorThe fire hose conversation is often centered on Twitter these days, but it's an issue across the social Web. Perhaps most of all, we should be thinking about what are the subsets of the fire hose and, in particular, how we use data streams in our lives.The real-time Web ebbs and flows. Most people find the real-time information well after it has been published in an activity stream. Thus, a proliferation of new search engines are coming to market, looking to capture this real-time data and making it relevant to users. Another distinction made in the discussion centered on how we consume real-time information and the persistence with which we need to get it. For instance, some information you do not need to be pinged on every 30 seconds. Instead, it may make more sense for it to be pushed to you when you need it. You may only get this information on rare occasions, such as an emergency. So when you do get that information, it is very relevant.The real-time Web may be instant, but our lives do not work that way. One participant said that he may be interested in a photo of his son that appears in his stream but perhaps not the photo of his son's buddy, who happens to like Scandinavian death metal music.So, the question becomes, how will the real-time Web fully develop. For Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, that's where open standards come into play. Interestingly, open standards are emerging as an oft-discussed issue at the Summit.Smarr made the point that RSS and Atom were designed to share the titles and bodies of blog posts. What we are actually sharing in an activity stream is far richer. What we need is language that embodies the far richer meta data that comes in a real-time activity stream. Pubsubhubbuband RSSCloudare starts, but there is still a lot of work to do to put the pieces together.Discuss
The real-time web isn't just for social apps. Its power to increase efficiency, accelerate response, and spot trends makes it ideal for organizational use, too.CitySourcedco-founder Kurt Daradicsmade an appearance at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit today and talked to us about how his accolade-winning startup allows governments and other organizations to harness the power of real-time applications.SponsorDiscuss
