Hot topics for 2009 – Realtime Web

Ok, this one is pretty obvious… you would have to be living in a cave high in the mountains and out of earshot of any internet-using humans to have missed the seismic shift from ‘kinda fresh’ to real-time on the internet.
This is big, really big, and it’s particularly interesting to me that it’s an area that seems to be a bit of a weak spot for Google and until recently some of the other giants like Facebook.
I’d go as far as saying that Twitter is not that interesting by itself, and it is really riding the realtime meme.
Twitter was in the right place at the right time, and pitched itself in the right way -the technology is not particularly interesting, and has existed in various forms for years.

Take a look at this timeline of the spread of news regarding Michael Jackson’s death from SEOMoz.

• It took over an hour for a large entertainment site to break the news of the cardiac arrest (TMZ.com).
• Another 42 minutes for Wikipedia to pick it up.
• A further 18 minutes before CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital (meanwhile, TMZ had posted news of his death)
• 15 minutes after the CNNbrk tweet, Wikipedia freezes the Michael Jackson page after a flurry of edits.
• A total of 2 hours after the 911 call, the TMZ story goes big on Digg
• By this stage, there are over 2000 mentions per minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
• At 22:40, a full 3 hours after the 911 call, the first mention of Michael Jackson’s death make it onto Google News.

Not hard to see a pattern here… Twitter, Wikipedia, Digg… mainstream news and the mighty Google were slow out of the blocks compared to the social sites.

I won’t bore you with too many links and details, but here’s a quick scan over the topic…

The realtime web is being built on XMPP, the ‘jabber’ protocol.

Everyone is starting to use XMPP, including Google (for Wave), Apple (for iPhone push notification), Twitter (for feeds to Twitter search and a couple of others) and Facebook (promised soon for their chat).

The major IM networks are starting to ‘get it’, and AOL now talks XMPP.

XMPP has loads of great stuff built in, like presence, personal eventing, multi-user chat, federated authentication, publish/subscribe functionality and loads more.

The bridge between the web and XMPP is BOSH.

The development pattern is called Comet , and typically uses the long-polling technique. Holding connections open is better than polling – the latency is lower, and total overhead is lighter.

BOSH and XMPP are typically used in web-based IM clients, but some clever engineers are re-purposing XMPP for multi-player games at sites like Chesspark.

Realtime search is becoming a hot topic, particularly at Techcrunch.

Realtime search is the beginning – I can see us using this at 24.com for content syndication, real-time Sport scoring, multi-player games and a couple of other (top sikrit) apps.

In fact, one of my greatest fears for our organisation right now is that we wake up too late and find ourselves in a 2D Roger Rabbit version of the internet that is NOT realtime.

More on the hot topics tomorrow….

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