Webb on the Web: What's the Real-Time Web?

With so much activity on Twitter these days, you may be one of a growing number of people who feel that Google, Yahoo and other traditional search engines aren't as current as they should be. For example, when the U.S. Airways plane safely landed into New York's Hudson River, photos, video, text and more were all being published immediately not by journalists, but via eyewitnesses on Twitter. If you wanted to know the latest information - if there were survivors, how they were being rescued, etc. - you needed to be on Twitter to track the news. News orgs weren't on the scene, and Google and Yahoo weren't indexing reports fast enough. Take a look at reporter Kevin Sablan's compilation of tweets from the landing.

Think about all of the recent news events worldwide: the Iranian elections, the global economic meltdown, football games... All the up-to-the-minute news was being published via social networks, covered later by traditional media and eventually indexed by one of the search engines.

A lot of people think that what shows up in search engines is the very latest news. In actuality, engines such as Google and Yahoo index content that's already been available on the web for several hours or more.

The idea that content will be indexed and available literally as soon as it's published is called the "real-time web." Some say that consumers have become so accustomed to real-time information via social networks, that the future of the web will inevitably hinge on instantaneous communications.

Here are a few real-time sites to try:

FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a way to aggregate the livestreams of your friends' and coworkers' via their various social networks. It now allows you to see your friends' updates in real-time, with no lag time at all.

Facebook
Facebook recently introduced "Immediate Notifications," which will let you know whenever anyone on Facebook takes action related to you. So for example, if someone tags a photo of you, you'll know instantly - rather than finding out days later, after too many people have seen that photo of you drinking too many cocktails...

Google-Twitter-Firefox
If you're using Firefox as your browser, you can add on a simple tool that will let you see real-time Twitter results in addition to other regular results on Twitter. You'll need to install the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox and follow these instructions.

Amy Webb is a digital media consultant and head of Webbmedia Group, LLC. She has also launched Knowledgewebb, a new website for multimedia training. You can also follow Amy on Twitter and delicious. Webbmedia Group is a vendor-neutral company. Any opinions expressed about products or services are formed after testing, research and interviews. Neither Amy Webb nor Webbmedia Group or its employees receives any financial or other benefits from vendors.