Are we really seeing the real-time web?
The phrase “real-time web” has been streaming its way around the Internet for a while now. It’s presently being used to describe information being available in search results as soon as it has been published by its author. Examples of this are Twitter or FriendFeed search.
As far as I’m aware it was Robert Scoble who made this phrase mainstream. Here’s an example from the start of February, but by this time Robert had been using the term for a while and a quick Google finds the term used as early as June 2008:
Let’s do a search for anyone who has written about the Canon 5D MK II but lets constrain that to posts that have at least one like and at least four comments. Here’s the search. Note that the post I wrote just one minute ago is already in the results page. This is the real-time web. – Robert Scoble (http://scobleizer.com/2009/02/09/is-the-real-time-web-a-threat-to-google-search/)
Whilst this is an example of something being almost instantly available from search does it really qualify as being “real-time”?
