Blogworld 09 - Real Time Web

Louis Gray gave a talk on real-time web applications and their growth. The information about the talk can be found here. My notes:

• Why real time now? There are lots and lots of free tools out there available to us. We have shorter attention spans and these tools cater to that.


• The real time tools can be better than Google because you can see real-time feedback. Consider the difference between using Google to search for a movie review and searching Twitter for the same movie and seeing tiny reviewlets.


• FriendFeed is another example of the real-time web.


• Louis is going through a series of online tools that allow you to do this. The benefit to this is that it becomes closer and closer to a normal, face-to-face conversation instead of the equivalent of the postal service.


• Pingie allows you to get mobile phone alerts from your feeds instantly so that you can react instantly if that's important to you. It sounds like something that would be important to Public Affairs folks for companies that could get attacked out in the blogosphere / twittersphere.


• The real-time web is eliminating the need for hitting the refresh button.


• Google Wave is at the early stages of this. I think this is Google's effort to stake out a big part in the real-time web. It was generally agreed in the room that Google Wave's implementation wasn't great, but that it's potential is enormous.


• The other great thing about this is that you get tons of information fed to you without killing your email inbox. If your company limits the size of your inbox, real-time web sharing tools like Google Wave completely circumvents these problems.

Louis Gray