Real-time web is coming. Right now we see the trickle of water coming around the bend with the logos of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Friendfeed floating upon them. Soon however, a deluge of platforms will emerge and we will all quickly look back to view the current state of the internet as static, disorganized, and unmanageable.

If you haven’t unraveled my analogies yet let me explain myself a little better. The internet used to be flat, static pages with hyperlinks glueing them together. Soon there were so many pages that the need for better organization became apparent. Aggregators came about which choose sites that they deemed pertinent to a number of topics or categories and indexed them. However, we soon realized that the aggregators were sluggish and held too much control over our browsing behavior. Do you remember when AOL used to have links to different sites? Do you know how much power was held by those who controlled what and who would be linked to? So out with aggregators, though a few are still in existence today, and in with search. Excite, Lycos, Yahoo, Google and soon enough AOL and MSN all jumped on the opportunity to create ways for you to explore the internet by keywords and authority decided by unmanned algorithms - for the most part, *ahem* Google.

But just like aggregation, search too has its flaws. Search requires one to know what they’re looking for. This means that no matter how important information might be, you’d never know it unless you were actively looking. Also, search rewards the rich. It is often said that hyperlinks are the currency of the internet which also means that big brand sites with lots of popularity will often dominate search results even if smaller/unpopular/less-hyperlinked sites produce better content. I’m sure you could think of many more ways in which search could be improved but regardless what we now need to look at is what’s coming next.

Real-time web is what is next. Real-time web means that information will be flowing through our screens in forms that have yet to be determined. I’d go out on a limb to say that feeds and tweets are simply the tip of a growing iceberg. The latest news, data, statuses, etc will all be collected and included into what many are likening to a stream. Steve Rubel goes even further to say that the future will involve the convergence of search AND real-time web. I don’t see why not, the organization and fairly established monetization model of search seems like it could compliment this ‘stream’ quite well.

But I do see some problems and pitfalls with real-time web that will have to be overcome. Most are purely logistical (for example censorship, categorization/organization, and bandwidth hogging) and can conceivably be overcome with new technologies and depend heavily on the execution of the platforms. Some however, are larger in scope and seem quite difficult to overcome. I’ll leave you with a few thoughts on what these will look like.

Recency vs. Quality

Much like how search rewards popularity over quality, real-time web will conceivably reward the most recent information in the stream verses that of high quality and authority. We all know the struggles of getting to the top position on a search query, now imagine that struggle with a SERP that is dynamic and changing by the second.

Lack of Big Picture
One of the problems with search was that you needed to know what you were looking for in order to receive the benefit. Twitter has taken a few steps to solve this problem. By revealing the trending topics we can see what everyone’s talking about and essentially have a view of the most popular/breaking stories. We all benefit simply by logging in and staring at the screen. Of course there’s an inherent problem with the trending topics and the stream (are you tired yet of that term?). With real-time web we can only get a snapshot of the news but lack the ability to see top topics from a few hours before that could be as pertinent if not more than any current topic. This snapshot is so narrow in breadth that things that happened only a few hours ago completely fall off the radar.

Lack of Depth and a Word of Advice
I think the most significant problem with a stream of information is the lack of depth that can be achieved. Even on Twitter, which is merely a sapling of what’s to come, we are inundated with updates that merely scratch the surface of any given topic. Then we refresh to do it all over again. It all becomes a little bit overwhelming when inputting so much information on so many different topics. I think those who will thrive in this new phase of digital information will be able to use the stream as a source of inspiration to go off and utilize other means to dig deeper and deeper into the true story. It’s often said that to be successful you should become an expert at one thing rather than an average at many.

In other words, know when to jump in and jump out of the stream while drawing the most benefit from each dip.