maleze booth

The real time web and especially search has been a dominant thought in the minds of those who want to grow the web to the next stage. Whether that stage is 3.0 or whether someone can brand it better doesn’t really interest me – what does interest me is how this real time experience can improve the usable web for everyone.

My following thoughts have been inspired by this blog post.

First I think it is fair to say that people’s patience is shrinking by the day – what would happily have been researched over the course of a week in a library is now required in a matter of minutes through the connected internet. The next stage is is mobilizing data so that information is delivered straight to the user by thought leaders instead of mathematical estimations by a search engine.

There is only two things that are going to push the envelope of the real time web, one, can people make money from it, and two, can people advance quicker from it. At the moment real time web is made up of a series of social networks offering a service by which individuals can self publish in real time. There is very little in the way of filter the experience from the receivers point of view. What I mean by this is that people can talk to each other but they have to already be aware of the club you can’t EASILY look back and use the old information to your advantage. It is very much like instant messenger at the moment people can be in the conversation but the throw away nature of the content and the lack of content hierarchy stops outsiders from even benefiting from it.

The is one big difference between IM and real time web and that is storage. At the moment the content might not be easy to go back over but you could because the information is stored.

I think that the way that real time web will grow is by utilizing it to create a better system of search engine – a recommendation engine without the need to by human mans. A system where a voice carries more weight than an arbitrary link on a quality domain. If real time web can qualify content in real time and understand the difference between one message and another compared to the original author then we could have a system for the future.

I think real time web is the next generation of internet information resource and it is something I am passionate about. Over the next months I will be developing a service that will hopefully utilise real time web and create a new user experience, but I can’t do it alone. If you have any thoughts on real time web and how it can be used to better internet experience contact me, or comment.