Arne van Elk's Library tagged microblogging →  View Popular

Search, however, is inherently post facto. It is a mechanism of forensics to help humans parameterize what they are looking for on the interwebs and the search tools diligently do their job to identify and produce results in a fairly consistent ‘page rank’-oriented way. Then you start the laborious process of hunting through the results to find the needle in the haystack and hope it’s relevant. In other words, an event happens, the search engine indexes this event (even if moments after it was created in near real time) and thus allows it to be discovered later via search. I think that our CEO Todd Vernon summed up three distinct categories for search really succinctly in his post on this subject of examining real time search…





1. DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don’t know it’s happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, digg, CNN, etc. I don’t have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
2. ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
3. SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that’s highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.

There seems to be no end to companies saying they offer real time search these days. And no end to people quoting how Google itself says it wants to improve in the area. But what does real time search really mean? This article offers some definitions and focuses on players in the space.

Real Time By Any Other Name Would Smell As Tweet

For me, “real time search” means looking through material that literally is published in real time. In other words, material where there’s practically no delay between composition and publishing. You take a picture and seconds later, it’s posted to the world to see. You think of something, immediately tap it out on Twitter, and your tweet is shared almost as soon as you thought of it.

What’s NOT real time publishing? Blogging, for the most part. A post has to be written, which typically will be at least a few paragraphs long. It may involve some research, taking more time. It may involve a ton of research, taking even more time. The mere act of creating and publishing the post will likely take more than a minute, if not several.

Many companies want to start using Twitter to promote their brand and business, but don’t really know where to start.  As most companies are starting to realize, Twitter is a great way to reinforce your brand, share news and important information, gather feedback , advertise and most importantly, start a dialogue with your customers and prospects – and the only cost is the time of the people involved with managing the Twitter feed.

Here is a short list of best practices for corporate Twittering that I compiled for one of my clients.  Most small-to-medium businesses should be able to achieve results with a couple of hours of effort per week.

Twitter's role in the Iranian election aftermath leaves no doubt about its power as a global, real time, citizen-journalism style news wire service, along with a tool for facilitating dissent, while countering the view of Twitter as simply a zone for egotistical banality. But it also highlighted Twitter's role as a platform and content generator for traditional media outlets, along with some of the key dilemmas being faced by professional journalists in the Twittersphere.

I've been researching the ways in which journalists and traditional media outlets are using Twitter and exploring the ethical dilemmas raised by the clash of the private and the public for journalists in the sphere via interviews with Australian, US and South African journalists. And, while I'm convinced Twitter is now a vital journalistic tool for both reporting events and breaking down barriers between legacy media and its audiences, there are still multiple questions around professional journalists' activities on Twitter that require thoughtful, open debate.

Like other social media sites, Twitter and FriendFeed are excellent personal and professional social outlets, connecting users to friends and colleagues regardless of boring problems like geography. But they also connect users to the content those friends and colleagues share, clueing them into their network's likes and dislikes and jacking them in to the editorial decisions those in their network make about the stories and content that matter to them most.

The best part? Everything about these services is eminently customizable, depending on which and how many followers you choose to include in your stream. You can use Twitter and FriendFeed to get the play-by-play of conference updates remotely, or keep tabs on any of a number of ongoing topics of interest. If you're publishing inclined, you can use these social content filters to track your favorite authors and publishers, or simply to get the latest updates from your favorite blogs and publications.

I asked both Campbell and Moss about use cases and whether “ordinary searchers” would understand how to use these engines. Campbell said that “events” and “places” were the primary use cases for the time being — Iran Election is an example of both. Yet both Campbell and Moss expressed optimism that “real-time search” will become a mainstream activity in the relatively near future.

Regardless the segment is arguably the hottest in search and there is now a pack of startups that claim to offer “real-time search” capability with Google and Facebook circling overhead. The concentration of activity in the space probably means that it is here to stay and that it will become a part of traditional search — although Moss believes it’s a vertical and won’t be building a complete web index.

Among the differences between traditional search and these new search competitors, we can expect them to evolve and “iterate” very quickly. After all, they’re playing in real time.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.