For most people, the “real-time Web” is synonymous with Twitter, but the real-time Web goes way beyond Twitter to a fundamental re-thinking of the way the Web works and the way content is archived online. That fact itself has huge follow-on consequences for companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — all of which rose to prominence when the real-time Web was nothing more than a vague construct of what might be possible. Rob Hof of Business Week recently wrote a fairly comprehensive overview of the real-time Web (with an emphasis on the cool real-time start-ups being funded by John Borthwick’s VC shop Betaworks).

A few quotes from the article, “Betting on the Real-Time Web”

The real-time web is the new trend, after a few years of Web 2.0

Amid the downsized remains of Web 2.0, with online advertising and e-commerce in a drought, they’re viewing the real-time Web as the Internet’s Next Big Thing—maybe even the source of the next Google (GOOG).

[Ron Conway] thinks there is at least $5 billion to be made on the real-time Web, from retailers providing instant discounts on Twitter to marketers targeting ads to people based on products or services they mention in tweets.

In just the past couple of years, several developments have come together to make the Web more of a real-time experience: ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections; a growing number of mobile devices such as the iPhone with full Web browsers; and new Web technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data. That mix has made always-on, real-time communications easy and addictive. The iconic example, Twitter, attracted 44.5 million people to its Web site in June, plus perhaps an equivalent number who gain access to its services via other sites and software. Facebook’s 250 million active users, whose instant status updates are a key part of its appeal, share more than 1 billion videos, photos, and other content each week

The real-time web is not that real-time, but provide valuable information on users that Google cannot always crawl

“Real-time” is actually a bit of a misnomer. Most of this activity doesn’t truly occur in real time, the way talking on the phone does, and social gestures such as sharing links with friends are just as important a part of the appeal as immediacy. These gestures—often accompanied by data from people’s profiles on social networks, such as where they live or their age—hold the key to the real-time Web’s moneymaking potential. What people are tweeting and sharing could be a potent indicator of their interests and intentions: When people type in a response to Twitter’s home-page question “What are you doing?” their answers also may reveal what they want to buy—right now.

This is an entirely new body of data from sources outside the search engines and more static sites that have dominated the Web. That’s why the real-time Web presents a big challenge to some Internet leaders—especially Google. Real-time streams are slippery for its computers to track. Google algorithms favor sites that attract many links from other sites, a proxy for importance. But such links can take days or weeks to build. Google has increased how often it indexes leading real-time sites, and Twitter activity is showing up more often in search results. But because Facebook and Twitter keep much of the data on this activity private, search engines can’t index it all.

(via Endless Innovation)