There has been a lot of buzz lately around Twitter and that’s not strange for several reasons. Anybody can create tweets in 5 seconds and the follow & be followed model is a 180 degrees turn from just semi-randomly placing your ad somewhere hoping you will get attention from anybody potentially interested or, even worse, any attention at all.

This model actually allows you to directly broadcast to anybody who has expressed interest in you, your topic, your company or your brand by choosing to follow you. It completes a shift that has been progressing for a while: from the old, 1 to many broadcasting and “I will tell you what you need” paradigm to a new many to many broadcasting paradigm, allowing anybody to express him-/herself and have an equal voice, whether you’re an individual consumer or a large corporation.

But if that’s not enough already, Twitter actually boosted the layer on top of the web that many weren’t aware of: the real-time web. Anything that’s broadcasted (tweeted) now on Twitter can be received now and directly re-broadcasted to others, allowing interesting content or news to propagate and spread lightning fast.

Above I chose the word “boosted”, because Twitter is not the epiphany of the real-time web, it ‘merely’ represents an important step in its evolution. So what’s next? What lies beyond the Twitter horizon? I created a list with some current trends and real-time web innovations I can think we can expect in the future. This list is obviously not complete, so I would like to encourage you to leave a comment, or to contact me directly, if you have any comments or additions!

Everything is real-time! Aggregate, engage and extract value

The real-time web has always been there: at this very moment countless new links, blogs, status updates, tweets, comments, images and videos are put on the web. There are now multiple services that allow you to aggregate, engage in and extract value (e.g. tracking, monitoring, analyzing) from it. FriendFeed, for instance, is a service that aggregates feeds from different social media and allows you to engage in discussions, it has lately gained quite some popularity. Further, multiple examples of services that extract value from the web’s (social media) dynamics are given in ReadWriteWeb’s post “The Future of Social Media Monitoring”. Expect to see services making new steps to somehow aggregate streams from the real-time web, allowing you to engage with it and extract value from it; the next section will also provide some examples of such services.

Now we can all break the news

With the growth of Twitter as a real-time medium the game of breaking and disseminating news is not exclusively the realm of news networks anymore. Breaking news can now also be a collaborative, ‘citizen journalist’, effort drastically reducing the time to break new stories.

The power of Twitter as a means for anybody to break and spread news became apparent to a larger audience after a plane crashed into the Hudson River, an event which got a lot of attention worldwide. Janis Krums broke the news of this miraculous event on Twitter 12 minutes earlier then the New York Times did, by sending the first picture tweet of the crashed plane via TwitPic.

You don’t even have to experience news events yourself to break news. Many services, such as Twitscoop and Twist, have popped up enabling anybody to see what’s trending on Twitter and thus what stories might be breaking. Further, tools like TweetGrid allow you to follow live what is tweeted about trending topics. In this manner anybody can start his/her own ‘news network’ to break news to a large public. Michael van Poppel, a 20-year old student, for instance, started BNONews after successfully gaining many followers on @breakingnews. See also this post of Loosewireblog.

Another interesting way to incorporate the real-time web in news is to use it to add context to news items. For instance, BreakingTweets adds tweets of people to a news item who are local to where the news occurs.

Traditional news networks are slowly adapting Twitter as a means to spread new news items. Almost all of us thought that @cnnbrk was a CNN Twitter account. However, as it turned out, it was managed by James Cox, a web developer, who wrote a ‘five-line Ruby script that yanked CNN’s emails and turned them into brief messages’. While in a race to be first to have a million followers, CNN took over control of the account and hired James as a consultant. See also this Techcrunch post.

In the future more smart algorithms and services will be developed to pick up breaking news from the real-time web. SkyGrid is a good example of a service that already takes harvesting the real-time web for financial news to a next level, see this interview by Robert Scoble.

As we take part in the real-time web more and more, we will all help break news and create context around it.

Can you handle the real-time web?

How many Twitter followers do you have? A 100? 1.000? Maybe even 10.000 or more? It’s safe to say that it’s almost impossible to read through and process all the information in your Twitter stream and all other real-time web streams.

For the real-time web to be truly adopted and used on a much broader scale in the future, tools will need to be developed that are able to help you manage information from it and transform it into a personalized experience providing you the information you need, when you need it, in the way you need it, giving you an overview without missing important details.

There are some tools available to manage your Twitter stream. For instance, Tweetdeck, a well known Twitter client, allows you to create filters only showing tweets in your Twitter stream with (or without) certain keywords. Some other examples of filter tools can be found here. There are also tools to recommend you whom to follow like Mr.Tweet or WhoShouldIFollow. These are just a few examples helping you to manage your Twitter life, but my point is that managing the real-time web is still in its infancy.

The real-time web needs to be aggregated (like FriendFeed does), filtered, summarized and mapped into representations that are easy to interpret. We will further need tools to recommend us topics and specific content, ‘happening’ right now on the real-time web, that are of interest to us in our current context.

Meta-data please!

Twitter is a very fundamental service that could, in my opinion, survive for a while without too many innovations. This is because many services can build on top of it, extending and repurposing it. A nice example in this context is TwitPic that effectively augments Twitter messages with images uploaded by users.

However, to sustain innovation on top of Twitter, and thus essentially to sustain Twitter, one minor, but fundamental, innovation needs to be made for sure: a separate field for metadata tags (e.g. hash tags, keywords, links, etc.). Here you can find a good post of Robert Scoble that also relates to the need for metadata in Twitter.

What would we do without meta-data? It makes searching, filtering, recommending and summarizing information possible or at least a lot easier. These are all functions important to enable Twitter, and the real-time web in general, to be used on a larger scale. Further, tagging, in the form of a URL, allows you to link one content item to another content item, for instance, a Tweet to a picture as in case of TwitPic.

Currently metadata is added directly in a Tweet in the form of hash tags, URLs or shortened URLs. Although this works, it leaves even less characters for you to type your tweet. Having a separate meta-data field gives you the freedom to use the complete message space for communicating what you want to say while enabling others to make a next step in the evolution of the real-time web by innovating on top of Twitter.

–Freddy