Introducing the real-time web

The web we all know and love is changing; maybe not changing so much as perhaps evolving a second head. 

We all know and love the “static web”.   This is where Google lives.  This is where our web site and yours lives.  Web pages, blog posts, images, reports, slideshows and videos – all media that has a shelf-life.  It is a twinkie. The details matter.  It get’s indexed by Google and – as SEO’s – we help make sure that people can find it and can find you.

Its time for you to meet the newly emerging “real time web”.  This is where Twitter lives.  This is about “now” – it is the thoughts, activities and life streams of millions of people that have no meaning beyond a very narrow window in time.  It is Milk – left out of the refrigerator.  It is typically more important in aggregate – trends, “swarms”, and buzz; but can also be useful in isolation (e.g. customer feedback).  Searching, analyzing and making sense of this data is how Twitter will reach beyond hype and become meaningful.

Will this “real time web” replace the “static web” that we all know and love?  Never.   

But being able to search for what people are saying about a product, company or event right now has value. 

Twitter will seek to build a revenue model around this new type of search engine and it could emerge as a new type of Google (note I am not saying that it will compete with Google directly). 

There are so many data streams with so little information (Twitter only allows 140 characters per “tweet”) that there is a huge technical challenge for Twitter to overcome in helping people analyse this data to make sense of it.   But I believe it can be done.