Will The Real Time Web Take Off? (Updated)

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LeapFish Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.

By David Ponce

You might have heard over the last few months: the Internet is entering what many are referring to as “The Real-Time Web”. In other words, where static pages were all the rage in the 90’s, and blogs, social networks and interconnectivity became popular in the early part of the new millennium, we’re now entering a phase preoccupied with what’s happening now. As in right this minute. One salient example where this played a critical role was in the controversial Iranian presidential election, where Twitterers on the ground were able to get reports out live, without any help from the press.

Of course, like any emerging movements the early days can be a little confusing. Everyone is a content creator and at any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people are updating their Twitter accounts, their MySpace pages or Facebook profiles causing a cacophony. To filter through the noise, tap into what is effectively democratized journalism and allow an orderly Real Time Web to emerge, several companies are getting into “Real Time Search”. Recently Google joined the fray with the display of scrolling live results to a large number of searches. Watch the video we’ve embedded below for more on this. Another company is LeapFish who’ve launched a portal that includes a Live Search section with content from Digg, Twitter ([Update] Yeah… that’s it) and other social networks.

Again, watch their video at the end of the article if you’re interested.

So the question is, who will own this space? Google became king of search because they devised an algorithm that did a better job than other search engines at being relevant, and I suspect that whoever manages to organize and filter through the noise will take a lead. Google’s particular algorithm won’t work in this case, at least not with the same parameters simply because of the constantly changing nature of the data to be parsed. Clearly this is all a work in progress but it’s nice to see some healthy competition at this early stage.

[ LeapFish ]

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