Fan­tas­tic write up David. Going to link back from my Medi­a­Post col­umn I am writ­ing now on the impli­ca­tions of real time search for marketers.

Hi David great post and report, it was really insight­ful. I have been debat­ing with a team mem­ber on what the impli­ca­tions will be for opti­mis­ing con­tent. Will real­time search open the door to a new wave of black hat opti­mi­sa­tion tech­niques and be real prob­lem? Or due to the fact the con­tent is cur­rently stream­ing through from social media plat­forms that already reg­u­late mis-use? would be really inter­ested in your thoughts!

It seems the real time search only takes up a minor part of Google and the search query page. Do you think this is strictly more for mar­keters? Because as a user I have no inter­est about real time Twitter/Facebook sta­tus searches.

Good arti­cle David. I think that many of the start-ups that you men­tioned repli­cate the tra­di­tional search expe­ri­ence: type key­word, see list of results. I think that in real-time three issues will be key: (1) search, nav­i­ga­tion and dis­cov­ery will tend to merge, (2) per­son­al­iza­tion will be a must and (3) an impor­tant social com­po­nent will need to be incor­po­rated. Tough work ahead !

You really have no inter­est in real-time sta­tus searches? You haven’t been play­ing it around with it. It’s actu­ally immensely valu­able and fas­ci­nat­ing. If you’re not inter­ested because you don’t want to know if everyone’s eat­ing a ham sand­wich right now, I under­stand, but tweets and Face­book sta­tus updates actu­ally give you real insight into the pub­lic inter­est right now. Start play­ing around with the real-time search engines and you’ll see what I mean.

Look­ing for­ward to read­ing it. Con­grats on its completion.

David, nice! I don’t have any crit­i­cisms per se, just per­sonal obser­va­tions (pre­dic­tions?) about mon­e­tiz­ing the social/real-time web. With respect to the real-time web poten­tially account­ing for up to 40% of all search activ­ity and $40B in rev­enue, this assumes all 40% of that traf­fic is worth mon­e­tiz­ing. Given the cur­rent “90/10” nature of the real-time web’s con­tent you refer to, it is appar­ent that much of it is worth­less (i.e. – unable to be mon­e­tized) noise. As Mar­keters move to the real-time web, they (and con­tent providers) need to remem­ber; it’s “Social” not “Com­mer­cial” Media. On the Social Web, there’s an ultra-fine line between enhanc­ing or intrud­ing upon the user experience…and alien­at­ing con­sumers. Noise is noise regard­less its source.
Like you, I see mas­sive up-side for the real-time web in enter­tain­ment con­tent. Con­tin­ued luck; I’ll be sure to look for more of your work.
@Joe March­ese — Thanks for link­ing to the article.

David, nice! I don’t have any crit­i­cisms per se, just per­sonal obser­va­tions (pre­dic­tions?) about mon­e­tiz­ing the social/real-time web. With respect to the real-time web poten­tially account­ing for up to 40% of all search activ­ity and $40B in rev­enue, this assumes all 40% of that traf­fic is worth mon­e­tiz­ing. Given the cur­rent “90/10” nature of the real-time web’s con­tent you refer to, it is appar­ent that much of it is worth­less (i.e. – unable to be mon­e­tized) noise. As Mar­keters move to the real-time web, they (and con­tent providers) need to remem­ber; it’s “Social” not “Com­mer­cial” Media. On the Social Web, there’s an ultra-fine line between enhanc­ing or intrud­ing upon the user experience…and alien­at­ing con­sumers. Noise is noise regard­less its source.
Like you, I see mas­sive up-side for the real-time web in enter­tain­ment con­tent. Con­tin­ued luck; I’ll be sure to look for more of your work.
@Joe March­ese — Thanks for link­ing to the article.

One of the aspects that came up in my inter­views but we didn’t get into heav­ily was spam. I make a men­tion of it in my report, the need to con­trol spam in real time, but I don’t go into depth. That could be another report in itself. And actu­ally, the sub­jects of spam might actu­ally have some inter­est in real-time infor­ma­tion. Why are spam­mers spam­ming this stuff now?

One of the aspects that came up in my inter­views but we didn’t get into heav­ily was spam. I make a men­tion of it in my report, the need to con­trol spam in real time, but I don’t go into depth. That could be another report in itself. And actu­ally, the sub­jects of spam might actu­ally have some inter­est in real-time infor­ma­tion. Why are spam­mers spam­ming this stuff now?

You really have no inter­est in real-time sta­tus searches? You haven’t been play­ing it around with it. It’s actu­ally immensely valu­able and fas­ci­nat­ing. If you’re not inter­ested because you don’t want to know if everyone’s eat­ing a ham sand­wich right now, I under­stand, but tweets and Face­book sta­tus updates actu­ally give you real insight into the pub­lic inter­est right now. Start play­ing around with the real-time search engines and you’ll see what I mean.

You really have no inter­est in real-time sta­tus searches? You haven’t been play­ing it around with it. It’s actu­ally immensely valu­able and fas­ci­nat­ing. If you’re not inter­ested because you don’t want to know if everyone’s eat­ing a ham sand­wich right now, I under­stand, but tweets and Face­book sta­tus updates actu­ally give you real insight into the pub­lic inter­est right now. Start play­ing around with the real-time search engines and you’ll see what I mean.

These are very good points. But the “social” com­po­nent is often all the real-time con­tent since all of it is com­ing from some type of social media tool. What I think is going to hap­pen is there will be more of a merger of the three dif­fer­ent types of appli­ca­tions: real-time search, social media mon­i­tor­ing tools, and most impor­tantly (and to your point) real-time inter­ac­tiv­ity tools such as Seesmic and Tweet­deck, but can do more than just Tweet at sta­tus updates.

Thanks bud. Yes, it took a while to just get the last items fin­ished. Do let me know what you think.

That’s a really good point. I guess I cov­ered my basis by say­ing “up to $40 bil­lion.” Although, the $40 bil­lion is in ref­er­ence to mar­ket val­u­a­tion, not rev­enue the com­pany is gen­er­at­ing in a year. It’s esti­mated that the entire mar­ket val­u­a­tion of tra­di­tional search hov­ers around $100 bil­lion. Using that logic, that’s $1 bil­lion for every 1%. And much of search is real-time search that Google and Microsoft weren’t sat­is­fy­ing, and now to a degree are.

That’s a really good point. I guess I cov­ered my basis by say­ing “up to $40 bil­lion.” Although, the $40 bil­lion is in ref­er­ence to mar­ket val­u­a­tion, not rev­enue the com­pany is gen­er­at­ing in a year. It’s esti­mated that the entire mar­ket val­u­a­tion of tra­di­tional search hov­ers around $100 bil­lion. Using that logic, that’s $1 bil­lion for every 1%. And much of search is real-time search that Google and Microsoft weren’t sat­is­fy­ing, and now to a degree are.