A New Web Requires New Thinking: Real-time

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By Thought Pick

The joke in the entrepreneurial corridors today is that if you have a business idea make sure you end the mission statement with “in real-time” , then use the word at-least 50 times in the business plan and you’ll get funded! ~ from Tushneem’s Ramble blog

Yes, that is true, and it comes as no surprise that real-time web is the next big thing. Twitter opened the door for real-time updates and gave the web a whole new – unexpected – dimension. Hundreds of applications were built on top of Twitter itself, and many others were built to utilize and address the benefits that come from real-time data. Immediacy of data is not what only defines real-time web, presence of information, syncing, efficiency and responsiveness all come into play. That explains the emergence of a range of different real-time services from real-time search engines, to real-time publishing, discovery, sharing, and even real-time push as a replacement of web crawlers.

ReadWriteWeb Summit

ReadWriteWeb Real-time Summit

A New Web?

A new web requires new thinking” that is at least what ReadWriteWeb hope for in their upcoming Real-Time Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. The summit will bring together big players from the industry including big names like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and MySpace alongside many other players in the real-time field such as Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, OneRiot, Twingly and others. It will focus on addressing potential opportunities and challenges related to the real-time web along with attempting to come up with a sort of a standardization and organization of the newly emerged web.

Now the big question is, are we really about to witness the next “version” of the Web? Web 2.0 was defined by its social networking face. Social networking has revolutionized the way we use the internet and thus stated a new era that we call Web 2.0. Today, we are facing a new revolution that builds on the aspects of social networking and give it another huge dimension that may very well be called the next web! Is real-time going to beat the semantic web to the term Web 3.0? The term Web 3.0 is widely used and connected to the semantic web and its promises, but yet again, we seem to be standing in front of the real-time web, trying to absorb the new rules of the next generation of web applications.

Social is Not Enough!

After the enormous success of Twitter, Big players in the industry realized that being social is not enough at this point of time. Facebook has been making drastic changes in its anatomy and has copied many aspects of Twitter, Google is fighting to get a position in the real-time world and Yahoo is doing the same. There is a new face to the web where even small websites will eventually have to follow up and add real-time elements in order to keep up with the rest. Today, most websites have either “Add this” button, or “Tweet Meme”, or any other tool that facilitates sharing and bookmarking, in the near future we may see other tools and services to turn the interactions on our websites into real-time.

Do you think that web users will start embracing everything real-time? What do you think would define the rules of the real-time web? Please let us know your opinion in the comment section.

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Tarek is the founder and chief researcher at Youngberry, a youth research and marketing firm dedicated to the region. Tarek founded interactiveME.com and previously worked as Manager at Flip Media (Interactive Agency), Bayt.com (Job Site) and Consulting House Qatar (Consulting firm). He is researcher and writer on internet & disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship, and youth culture.