This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data , The Real-Time Web , Personalization , Mobile Web / Augmented Reality . The fifth and final part of our series is about the Internet of Things , when real world objects (such as fridges, lights and toasters) get connected to the Internet. In 2009, this trend has ramped up and is adding a significant amount of new data to the Web. In this post we'll see how companies as big as IBM and as small as Pachube are building up this new world of Internet data and services. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! What is The Internet of Things? The Internet of Things is a network of Internet-enabled objects, together with web services that interact with these objects. Underlying the Internet of Things are technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors , and smartphones . The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things will enable. Imagine a refrigerator that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you're low on milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you. However, we're not quite at that level of sophistication yet in the Internet of Things. As we discovered in our Internet Fridges State of the Market in July, current Internet fridges are more about entertainment than utility. IBM and The Internet of Things One of the leading big companies in Internet of Things is IBM , which offers a range of RFID and sensor technology solutions. IBM has been busy working with various manufacturers and goods suppliers in recent months, to introduce those solutions to the world. For example IBM announced a deal at the end of June with Danish transportation company Container Centralen . By February 2010, Container Centralen undertakes to use IBM sensor technology "to allow participants in the horticultural supply chain to track the progress of shipments as they move from growers to wholesalers and retailers across 40 countries in Europe." Specifically this refers to transportation of things like flowers and pot plants, which are very sensitive to the environment they travel in. Having sensors as part of the entire travel chain will allow participants to monitor conditions and climate during travel. Essentially it makes the travel process very transparent. Pachube: Building a Platform for Internet-Enabled Environments IBM is a leading bigco active in the Internet of Things. At the other end of the spectrum is a small UK startup which has impressed us a lot this year: Pachube . It was one of 5 Internet of Things services that we profiled in February and we followed up with an in-depth look at the service in May . Pachube, (pronounced "PATCH-bay") lets you tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments both physical and virtual. In a blog post by Tish Shute, Pachube founder Usman Haque explained that Pachube is about "environments" moreso than "sensors." In other words, Pachube aims to be responsive to and influence your environment - for example your home. Conclusion What's the point of all this new object data from the Internet of Things? As well as the new types of functionalities it will enable, such as health monitoring by Internet fridges, the sheer amount of new data about an object should lead to better quality goods and better decision-making by consumers. For example when you buy a loaf of bread from the grocery store, it will have its own RFID tag - which theoretically can tell you when it was produced, when it was packaged, how long it traveled to get to the store, whether the temperature during its travel was optimal, the pricing history of the product, what the precise ingredients are and associated health benefits (or dangers), and much more information. That ends our look at the 5 biggest trends of the Web in 2009. First thing next week we will post a round-up, along with a downloadable presentation. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Internet of Things

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum , Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Says Parviz, "We're starting with a simple product, a contact lens with a single light source, and we aim to work up to more sophisticated lenses that can superimpose computer-generated high-resolution color graphics on a user's real field of vision." For now, Parviz mentions that single pixel visual cues for gamers and the hearing impaired are already quite possible with the lens prototypes. The group has also experimented with non-invasive biomonitoring including checking glucose levels for diabetics. Some of the obvious challenges of building an augmented reality contact lens include: 1. The Need for Custom Parts: Regular circuitry and LEDs are incompatible with regular contact lenses. Every piece of this project must be fabricated from scratch. 2. Physical Constraints: The group must attempt to fit transistors, radio chips, antennas, diffusion resistors, LEDs and photodetectors onto a minuscule polymer disc. Additionally, the team is required to control lens position and light intensity relative to the pupil. And finally, because the lens is so close to the corneal surface, the group must project images away from the cornea using either micro-lenses or lasers. 3. User Safety: In addition to protecting the eye against chemicals, heat and toxins, the lens components must be semi-transparent in order for the wearer to view their surroundings. "We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions. As far as we're concerned, the possibilities extend as far as the eye can see." And you thought the iPhone SDK was a tough nut to crack. For Parviz's complete seven-page article, check out the IEEE Spectrum's Biomedical page. Discuss

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Your Cyborg Eye Will Talk to You

Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha 's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May , as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia. Even now there is still confusion about what Wolfram|Alpha is and what its main use cases will be. In this interview with Russell Foltz-Smith, we discuss what people are using Wolfram|Alpha for now; and more importantly what its uses will be in the near future. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Wolfram|Alpha: What is it Good For? Wolfram|Alpha is a product that was built on top of founder Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica product, a software tool for mathematicians that was initially released in 1988. The aim is to allow users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those. Wolfram|Alpha was first conceived and started development about 4 years ago, and just 6-8 months ago the team gave serious consideration to taking the product to a wider consumer audience. I started out by asking Foltz-Smith what the Wolfram|Alpha team thought of all the media hype around their product, particularly about the "Google Killer" theme which many media outlets reveled in. Foltz-Smith replied that they were expecting to be compared to Google, but not to that extent. Their team was a little surprised there wasn't more discussion around Wolfram|Alpha's similarities to Wikipedia and Freebase (although he noted that ReadWriteWeb certainly covered that!). Regarding the Google comparisons, Foltz-Smith said that they didn't give into the hype - they stuck to what their goals were. I remarked that many people still seem confused about what Wolfram|Alpha does and what it can be used for. Foltz-Smith said that people will use it for different things. The crux of the product though is that it allows people to compute and calculate things. But will mainstream people use Wolfram|Alpha? Right now, it seems to be focused on mathematicians. Foltz-Smith replied that yes, eventually Wolfram|Alpha will find a mainstream audience. It has started specific, but it will go broader. First, he said, it has to "pass a test" with "serious users" - by which he means academics and computational users. If it's useful for them, claimed Foltz-Smith, it will then go mainstream. Use Case: Education One real-world use case we talked about was using Wolfram|Alpha in education. Russell Foltz-Smith said that Wolfram|Alpha could be used to automatically generate problem sets for students, and then research those sets. A recent article in education website Chronicle.com argued that Wolfram|Alpha may have a less desired effect: encouraging cheating and laziness in students. This is because Wolfram|Alpha not only solves complex math problems, it "also can spell out the steps leading to those solutions." Stephen Wolfram told Chronicle.com that computer-algebra systems like Wolfram|Alpha actually improve education - because they allow students to explore complex problems on their own and intuitively determine how functions work, rather than just learn rote processes. Wolfram claimed that "it's better to let them [students] stand on that platform and go further." Either way, it's clear that Wolfram|Alpha and similar computational software will force the education system to adapt and change. Students now have a new (and certainly easier to use, as it's on the Web) platform on which to compute things. There's no point in the education system pretending it doesn't exist. If you're interested in tracking the progress of Wolfram|Alpha in educational settings, there is a wiki devoted to 'Teaching Undergraduate Math with Wolfram|Alpha.' Use Case: Computational Journalism This one was described to me as "anomaly spotting." For example with the current interest in swine flu news, Wolfram|Alpha could be used to fact-find and compute interesting trends. As Foltz-Smith described it, Wolfram|Alpha could "automatically enhance news." Foltz-Smith noted that CNN and other major networks do this already (analyze data), but that it's expensive to do. The end results on CNN are added value things like interactive maps and fancy diagrams. Wolfram|Alpha could make this type of data gathering and analysis presentation inexpensive and common place amongst all kinds of news operations - including good old blogs. Use Case: Sports Watching Imagine sitting in your sofa in the lounge, remote control in one hand and your favorite beverage in the other. You're watching the Friday night game on TV, it's a close game and you're curious about which team has the better chance of winning. Why, check Wolfram|Alpha of course! In real time, Wolfram|Alpha could compute statistics about not just the history of the two teams - but the history of the location of the game, the weather, the season so far, etc. As Foltz-Smith explained it, Wolfram|Alpha would be able to do "chained queries" - queries made up of multiple parts. For example: which quarterback had the best winning record in games played in the rain during the 1970s. Other Use Cases We also discussed medical and scientific use cases. Although there are early examples of Wolfram|Alpha in health, such as a nutrition label generator , Foltz-Smith was generally cautious about medical uses - because a lot of health data "can't be wrong." He noted that in use cases like medical research, the issue of data fidelity is key. For example with the human genome, you have to take great care of that data and associated algorithms. Also he explained that as something like the human genome scales, how do you do QA? Foltz-Smith admitted that the Wolfram|Alpha team is still working on these and similar issues. But they have a lot of people devoted to solving this problem. Some types of data could be crowdsourced, e.g. in linguistics, but other data needs different approaches. Conclusion It was interesting to hear about some of the potential uses of Wolfram|Alpha. We at ReadWriteWeb think this product has a promising future. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data. Let us know in the comments what use cases you see for Wolfram|Alpha, and whether you're aware of similar computational web apps. See also: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions Wolfram|Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha Launch: Here's What You Need to Know Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update Discuss

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Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data , our second about The Real-Time Web . The third part of our series is on Personalization . Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations . Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! All of the trends that we're profiling overlap. This is particularly so with personalization, as we'll see. Filtering the Real-Time Firehose Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web : "The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences." If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you're able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work. Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured - allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties. How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant. There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include: Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another. OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on. OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn't. APML - growing 'Attention' standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume. Recommendation Engines Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like . A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations : Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself A combination of the three approaches above Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres. Conclusion Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn't been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Image credit: davepatten Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Personalization

Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups, let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy. Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica !), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday , "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of." That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".) However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create. Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all. But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs? Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense. What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately? Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious ? Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace. MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue. While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools. What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.? Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends. And Napster? Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio. Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic 's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands . It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike. In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them. Discuss

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10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

A hypothetical discussion between a cloud consultant and his client that is just too good not to post. Just be forewarned - this is NSFW. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! No one is spared by "the consultant": "No one knows what is going on. Not even Gartner. Especially Gartner." " CloudCamp is just a bunch of vendors getting pissed, eating pizza and comparing the size of their case studies." "And what is this about Microsoft. They are considered to be one of the four big cloud providers and they are about as cloudy as Steve Ballmer is cool." It goes on. it does strike a chord. The hype about cloud computing is so ripe for satire. Almost as much as social media - which apparently was the inspiration for this sketch. The cloud consultant makes his point pretty well about the state of the cloud computing market. Hardly anyone is making any money. Have we not seen this before in our world of over charged tech enthusiasm? In the meantime, according to the consultant, the only ones making a dime (barely) on cloud computing are a bookseller and a search engine. "And maybe Salesforce," the consultant says. "And they were cloud before cloud was cloud." Discuss

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The Cloud Consultant Spares No One

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We're posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. Our opening post was about Structured Data . In this article we look at probably the most hyped trend of 2009: the Real-Time Web . It has become a core part of many Internet products this year: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google, Delicious, WordPress, and many others. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! What is the Real-Time Web? Ken Fromm wrote an insightful primer to the Real-Time Web for ReadWriteWeb. In it he explained that the Real-Time Web is a new form of communication, it creates a new body of content, it's immediate, it's public and has an explicit social graph associated with it, and it carries an implicit model of federation. One of the early leaders in the Real-Time Web was FriendFeed , a lifestreaming service that became popular with early adopters. Co-founder Paul Buchheit (who also built the first version of Gmail, during his time at Google) told ReadWriteWeb in May that "the open, real-time discussions that occur on FriendFeed are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." Everything is Real-Time Now We must of course begin our product overview with Twitter . In March this year the super-trendy microblogging service marked its 3rd birthday. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained at the time, it's really the story of Twitter as a platform that is most exciting. However the Real-Time Web is much more than Twitter. It has changed the products and strategies of almost every major Internet company in 2009 . Google may have missed the early action , but by May 2009 co-founder Larry Page was proclaiming that Google had to do a better job of being real-time. It's started that process. For example Google is behind a project called PubSubHubbub , which delivers RSS feeds much faster (near real-time). PubSubHubbub is already making Google Reader faster . But while you're waiting for Google search to become truly real-time, you can at least add Twitter results to it with this plug-in . In March, Facebook launched a site redesign emphasizing a real-time stream of updates on users' homepages. Although this was unpopular with users , Facebook continued to dabble in Real-Time. In June, Facebook announced a new search interface allowing users to search for content from people, organizations, and other public figures as soon as they share it on Facebook. This was described as "up-to-the-minute" search results - in other words a real-time search engine. Meanwhile in April, FriendFeed introduced a revamped user interface that focused much more on real-time updates than previously. The most impressive change was the new advanced filters, which made it a lot easier for users to create streams based on keywords, groups, sets of friends and more. FriendFeed's filters added something powerful to the Real-Time Web. In August, Facebook further strengthened its Real-Time chops by acquiring FriendFeed . This immediately brought more real-time sophistication into the Facebook family - we're yet to see how Facebook will use it though. In August Yahoo's influential social bookmarking service Delicious was re-born as a real-time news tracker . It launched a new home page, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter. The real-time updates continue... earlier today, all blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud . Conclusion In May, Marshall Kirkpatrick identified three forms of value from the Real-Time Web : ambiance, automation and emergence. In August, Bernard Lunn compared it to the real-time world of the trader . The Real-Time Web is all of those things and more. 2009 has in many ways been the Year of the Real-Time Web . But it's early days yet, because we - collectively - are still looking for ways to use all of that extra real-time data. We've made a lot of data real-time and surfaced it in search and our filters. But what new applications and intelligence can we build off this data? That question will be answered over the coming few years. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web