nytimes.com— The value of real-time search is clear, but many other valuable Web services have struggled to find effective business models.
Oct 25, 2009View in Crawl 4
It's definitely going to be happening more in the future that digg will have to adapt to as well. Getting news from trending topics and patterns is a very time effective and smart way to get info.
It's called Internet Relay Chat. You pick a channel or two of interest, join, sit, watch.The second it scrolls on your screen, that's real-time. The next second is not real-time. It's history by then. I think what these "real-time" search people mean is something like "search the past few minutes."But either way, it's silly. The utility of Twitter and Facebook is entirely word-of-mouth. News of that US Airways plane would probably hit CNN first, then you'd get swamped with friends posting crap on Facebook and Twitter within a few minutes or an hour. News that you aren't looking for and don't know what to search for finds you. By the time you know what to search for, then that's a solved problem. /join #US_Airways_CrashThere's also the danger that when you talk about news in the real-time, you're really talking about *events*. Events is not journalism. Events do not tell a story--they reveal a tiny tiny part of a large picture and if not handled with maturity can be equivalent to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
Everyone followed balloon boy on twitter? Really. That seems like a step in the wrong direction. I didn't follow it on twitter but I'm guessing the live video I watched was better that tweets.
Joanna, I think you raise an important point; Twitter likely has reached critical mass, and some company will come up with a reliable solution to monetize the information generated by the crowd on the service. What the model will look like is completely up in the air, and above comment by grnicon raises very valuable points about instances when Twitter likely would have little marketing value. I'm intrigued by the increase in conversation generated by it, however, and I agree with you that it would be very foolish to ignore it.
brokenanimatorOct 25, 2009
It's definitely going to be happening more in the future that digg will have to adapt to as well. Getting news from trending topics and patterns is a very time effective and smart way to get info.
grniconOct 25, 2009
It's called Internet Relay Chat. You pick a channel or two of interest, join, sit, watch.The second it scrolls on your screen, that's real-time. The next second is not real-time. It's history by then. I think what these "real-time" search people mean is something like "search the past few minutes."But either way, it's silly. The utility of Twitter and Facebook is entirely word-of-mouth. News of that US Airways plane would probably hit CNN first, then you'd get swamped with friends posting crap on Facebook and Twitter within a few minutes or an hour. News that you aren't looking for and don't know what to search for finds you. By the time you know what to search for, then that's a solved problem. /join #US_Airways_CrashThere's also the danger that when you talk about news in the real-time, you're really talking about *events*. Events is not journalism. Events do not tell a story--they reveal a tiny tiny part of a large picture and if not handled with maturity can be equivalent to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
Closed AccountOct 25, 2009
Everyone followed balloon boy on twitter? Really. That seems like a step in the wrong direction. I didn't follow it on twitter but I'm guessing the live video I watched was better that tweets.
ghostwoOct 25, 2009
There is a work-around. If you get google to link to it, you can view it for free. But google has to be the last page visited. Observe:<a class="user" href="http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&amp;um=1&amp;cf=all&amp;ned=ca&amp;hl=en&amp;q=%22How+High+Will+Real-Time+Search+Fly%22" rel="nofollow">http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&amp;um=1&a ...</a>
peterwylieOct 25, 2009
Joanna, I think you raise an important point; Twitter likely has reached critical mass, and some company will come up with a reliable solution to monetize the information generated by the crowd on the service. What the model will look like is completely up in the air, and above comment by grnicon raises very valuable points about instances when Twitter likely would have little marketing value. I'm intrigued by the increase in conversation generated by it, however, and I agree with you that it would be very foolish to ignore it.
7ajiOct 26, 2009
I just clicked on the link and I can read it fine without registering, not that I want to finish it after reading Twitter.
swagvOct 27, 2009
We already had real-time search a few years ago. It was called Technorati. Jog on.