Last year, when we looked at the top real-time Web products of 2009, we predicted that in 2010 the real-time Web was “likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world”. Indeed, as we look back on the last year we find that many of the big innovations in terms of the real-time Web come in the form of implementations by companies like Google and Facebook. At the same time, there are still smaller players in the realm that have changed how (and how fast) we expect information on the Web to move and people interact.
Just a year after companies like Facebook started offering a constantly updated stream of real-time content, we expect no less from nearly any site we visit and soon enough, calling something “real-time” will be like identifying something as “social”. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the top 10 products, innovations and developments in the world of the real-time Web in 2010.
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Google Instant: Search Goes Real-Time
Google is one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet and its most popular product – Google Search – just got faster than ever this year with the introduction of Google Instant. Throughout 2010, Google worked to increase the speed of its search results, both in how quickly results are served and how close they are to real-time. Google incorporated real-time Twitter results, Google Instant. Already, Google would predict your search terms as you typed, but now, each keystroke gives a different set of results. In reality, however, Google Instant is just a surfacing of all the strides Google has made in the world of real-time information.
Google…Everything Else
Looking through the ReadWriteWeb archives for 2010, you can find a litany of articles about Google and its continual addition of real-time information. From sports scores to Myspace updates to weather conditions in Google Earth, Google has worked to add real-time information to products across the board. The company brought real-time discussion to YouTube with Google Moderator, instant notifications to Google Voice, real-time inventory to Google Product Search and real-time news to Google Reader. Heck, Google even turned on automatic captioning for all videos on YouTube and admitted that it was working on completing a real-time translation tool for use in smartphones “in a few years time.”
It’s because of companies like Google that “real-time” is quickly becoming a term that describes our standard expectations, not the mind-expanding future of the Web that it once was.
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