2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things , when real world objects (such as lights, cars and packages) get connected to the Internet. This trend has added a significant amount of new data to the Web, so for that reason alone it is an important development. Having said that, many of the following top 10 list are not yet mainstream products. But we expect some of them to become well known over the coming years. Underlying the Internet of Things are technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors

Google launched its version of integrated real-time search , one of a number of impressive product demos given, at a press event this morning. It's much better than what Bing and Yahoo! have done , but it's still just the beginning of a full-scale engagement with the real-time web. To provide further context to this discussion, we're rerunning a post we wrote in seven months ago, titled " 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web. " We hope you find it useful and interesting. Sponsor Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways. Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away , about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet. The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing . Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot this morning turned up even more big news that's right around the corner for the Real Time Web. But what's the point? What's in it for us, as users? We offer below three models of value that we suspect will be found in the Real Time Web. They are the concepts that underly the vision described above at the top of this post. Those concepts are Ambiance, Automation and Emergence . This is just an initial exploration of ideas, reality will undoubtedly be more complicated shortly. We welcome your participation in thinking about this part of the fast-approaching future of the web. Ambiance The web is made up of web pages linked together, but hovering around many of those pages are now social media signals like blog posts, bookmarks, tweets and other URLs that refer to a page but aren't visible when you're looking at it. The same is true for concepts. Most of us use Google to find pages about things we're looking for, but Google prioritizes historical inbound links and the text on pages. In the above image you can see a custom search engine we use here at ReadWriteWeb, with Mark Carey's Twitter on Google greasemonkey script running on top of it. If you want to know about streaming video, Forrester's, Jeremiah Owyang, has a running list of vendors in the space (1) and that's where you want to start - but wouldn't you like to know about the very freshest (2) live streaming vendors on the market as well? That's what people are talking about, in real time, on Twitter. In our experience these Twitter augmented search results are valuable because they are up to the minute - but sometimes they are also just better . Someday you'll be able to discover Owyang's list and be prompted to view the most recent, the most authoritative and the most "socially relevant to you" conversations about the same concept going on all around the web. People are working on all of that and as research-lovers we hope they succeed. The point is that no matter what you're doing on the web, there are valuable related activities going on elsewhere - probably simultaneously. Exposing those is exciting. Automation We probably should have started out with this, but what's the most obviously valuable example of clear value in real-time information delivery in recent internet history? Blackberry and the push email! We tend to assume that the real time web is something we'll be looking at constantly, because it's constantly bringing up new information. That doesn't have to be the case, though. The real time web could very well just do its thing and notify us, in real time, of important events. Thresholds crossed. Simple changes made. For example, when the already controversial Google Chrome Terms of Service were changed again last December, I got an SMS sent to my phone notifying me that it had been changed. I was able to jump online, grab a screenshot of the changes from the application that was monitoring the document and report on the change before anyone else . I certainly wasn't watching for the change. A robot was doing that for me and let me know about the change in near real time. It was pretty awesome, but it wasn't real time and the services I patched together to do it are all marginal enough that they often don't work or are very late. Put real time at the center of the web and we'll be able to automate all kinds of information monitoring. At first it will be a competitive advantage for those who use it strategically; then it will just change the game, become standard practice and require competitive knowledge workers to come up with something else that's new. Read the last section of this post and the comments readers left here: 3 Models of Value in the Real-Time Web Discuss

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What the Real-Time Web Can Deliver

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results - sometimes just above the fold of the page. The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It's hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling. Sponsor Bing is a Bummer Bing's "real-time search" comes in the form of a special page for Twitter results . On that page you see a tag cloud of popular terms on Twitter, links shared regarding those terms and a few recent tweets in which each link appeared. It's not very visually appealing. In fact, it's downright ugly. It's also not integrated extensively into the main Bing site. Search results on Bing come only from Twitter and links share on Twitter. There are a lot of low-value retweets displayed. Twitter is of course just a small part of the real-time web. Yahoo is MIA Yahoo! on the other hand, displays Twitter as a tab in a select few news search results pages. That tab offers links being shared on Twitter, not tweets themselves. It's very hard to find a search result that uses Twitter results, though, on Yahoo! Google Is The Winner So Far Google's implementation, at least in this demonstration, brings real-time search front and center, displays commentary from Tweets, links being shared through a variety of channels and will soon display messages from MySpace and Facebook. It's broader, the User Experience is better and it's more prominent. Are There Still Alternatives? There are countless real-time search engines that have to be disappointed to see Google going its own way instead of acquiring a real-time search startup, and its unclear how many of those services still offer something unique that Google hasn't now captured in this announcement. Aardvark is one and its now reported that Google is looking to buy that company. We'll still await the full public roll-out of Google's real-time search, its integration with the company's new Social Search, with localization and personalization. So far it looks like Google has done what neither Yahoo! nor Bing have, though - create a compelling, serious real-time search experience. Discuss

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Google is Beating Bing & Yahoo Again, Now In Real-Time Search

It has been a few weeks since the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit . Workshops ran the gamut of real-time Web applications and services. They addressed the impact of the real-time Web on search, feeds, aggregation and even branding and marketing. But several topics and terms were not discussed as much as one might have expected: "social," "interaction," and "communication." Perhaps they were assumed. But their absence from discussion spoke of something bigger; namely, our tendency to still view Web content, even real-time content, as information . Sponsor This guest post was written by Adrian Chan. Of course, communication involves information. Information access and distribution are part of what makes social media interesting. Information is also an attribute of social relationships — which are another good reason to respect social media. But the tools and practices of our "status culture" are also a means of communication; communication that uses social media in personal, social and public ways and that combines both system messaging and user messages in ways that are conversational. Making Meta From Conversational Media This "conversational" content may look like information. But when it is the product of mediated conversation, content conceals dynamics and relationships: social forces that are by their nature implicit and tacit. The real-time Web industry is poised to go "meta" and to extract and extend greater value from the information captured, mined and repurposed in real time. But for this to occur, the implicit of social interaction and communication will need to become explicit. Consider what we can already observe and infer from content and information produced on the real-time Web: influence, social capital, attention, relationships, trending topics. We accomplish this by means of algorithms and analyses based on incomplete social information. The real-time Web doesn't yet furnish much social meta data. Could it be restored after the fact — from interactions, relationships and social meanings read between the lines? The real-time Web's conversational content is produced through uncoupled, or at best loosely coupled, posts. Can dialog, relationships and social structures be detected amidst monological posts? The Content Is People. Long Live the Content! Social media are the new means of production. We are no longer in the information age, but are now in the age of communication. And in this age, the attention economy may explain the disruptive impact of social media on established industries; industries, not coincidentally, built around the production and distribution of information — as well as control over its consumption. Content is king. The content of the real-time Web is people. And yet the socialized Web is much more than a Web of, by and for the people. The social world is not flat, open and transparent. It has distinctions, boundaries, biases and preferences. It is also about who chooses, what is chosen, who is chosen, who replies and why. Social Value Add "People" content produces social information, and it is relevant because it reflects the social preferences, tastes and interests of individuals, groups and communities. Communication is how we produce this information; attention is how we consume it. Real-time Web analytics and metrics already understand this. Influencer metrics count who chooses whom as well as what. Influence is contingent on the ongoing attention paid by an audience. It is not a quality owned or possessed by the influencer. It's a relation between influencer and an "audience" willing to pay attention and help pass it forward. This is the medium's power. That power is as much in social relations as it is in information and content. Understanding what interests a user, by means of their contributions and activities but also by means of their relationships and social interactions, is at the heart of the value that the real-time social Web holds for brands and businesses (as well as the value that the user adds to their reputation and visibility). Attention spent in communicating reproduces brand value by redistributing it socially (and free of charge). Social Context The real-time Web is built on uncoupled posts. But many online social interactions are at least loosely if not densely coupled. This coupling restores some degree of social context (social information). It may reveal social relationships (relational information). The speed, reach and redistribution of tweets and updates expose social organization (attention information). And when observed and analyzed over time, changes in this activity can reveal persistent interests and relationships, as well as those that are changing (historical trends and predictive information). Social contexts can be partially reconstructed out of other communication forms: chains, loops and circuits, clusters, clumps (and more). Satellite "conversations" fashioned from re-aggregated comments (see PubSubHubbub , Dave Winer's RSSCloud and the new salmon protocol ) will spark innovation in contextual analyses. But all the social analytics in the world won't work unless the architectural and data models can capture communication. If tools and applications can increasingly provide ways to communicate in ways that also expose social context, and if data-mining efforts are enhanced with models of social action, then the world of real-time social interaction will surface immensely valuable information indeed — at which point we may be able to say that in the midst of all this information, we are also better informed. Adrian Chan is a social interaction design specialist and SNCR Sr Fellow. You can find him on Twitter @gravity7 and on his blog . Discuss

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Getting More Out of the Conversation: The Real Real-Time Challenge

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web - the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom. Sponsor That sounds crazy, but Lockhart's now three-person Atlanta company has actually done a remarkably good job of unearthing good content in a compelling user experience. Regator offers users a curated collection of high-quality sources on more than 500 topics, everything from martial arts to ceramics, aviation, cheerleading, law and Antarctica. Of course there are tech and business channels, too. Regator just got its $2 premium iPhone app into the iTunes store and it's the best "channel clicker" for niche content we've seen yet. There's something a little bit odd about having the borders of your internet limited by someone else, but the Regator user experience is excellent otherwise. It's well designed and fun to use. User experience is key to making the web...usable. I've wished for years that more people got excited about sharing OPML files, bundled collections of dynamic RSS feeds, but that just hasn't happened. Curation, bundles of content, discovery - these are functions of a prolific web that a new crop of services is trying to tackle with good design and tough decisions about openness versus...something else. Regator is an interesting entry into this place of tension and possibility. The new premium iPhone app offers subscription to the selected blogs you like, video viewing, recommendations of related posts and issue tracking by keyword search. You can view the most recent posts from sources, or the most popular posts with other Regator users. But is this just a pretty looking walled-garden? Regator brings to mind an admittedly paranoid but important blog post that consultant Chris Messina wrote this week called The Death of The URL . "I see signs that the essential freedoms of the web are being undermined by a cadre of companies through the introduction of new technologies and interfaces that, combined, may spell the death of the URL...As a user experience designer, [the responsibility lies with] my discipline and peers to provide the right kind of ideas and leadership. If we get the design right, we can empower while clarifying; we can reduce complexity while enhancing functionality; we can expand freedom while not overwhelming with choice. Surely these are the things that good, thoughtful user experience design can achieve! "If I were forced to choose between all the messiness of free will over the 'comfortability' of a contrived existence, I'd choose the red pill, time and time again. And I hope you would too. From WebTV to the tightly controlled iPhone app platform, though - these interfaces can be very compelling to use. One of the risks of a controlled platform, perhaps secondary to the inherent loss of freedom, is that whoever is in control might not do a good job of picking out what shows up. Editorial control risks conflicts of interest and a lack of broad editorial knowledge compared to what topic experts know. It's not an easy role to play. Kimberly Turner is the editor of Regator's selection of blogs. She's a former magazine writer and she works with volunteer reporters and editors who suggest top blogs in niches when they have free time. Turner doesn't believe that Regator is guilty of the sins that Messina calls other companies out for. Whether you're finding sites through Google's algorithm, the community votes at Digg or your friends on Twitter "we all use some service or site to help us find what we're looking for," Turner says "and those are all 'curated' in some way." "Regator's human-powered curation is simply less likely to yield poor quality content than some others'," Turner contends. Thousands of blogs are included on Regator already and Turner says new features like related posts and searches help users "explore and wander into fresh territory rather than getting stuck in a rut and going to the same small subset of blogs repeatedly." So far there are 20 blogs in the wine category for example, just 1 in the beauty/nails subcategory, 4 hockey blogs, 22 law blogs, 3 blogs about cheerleading and 7 about Emergency Medical Services. The service adds new sources based on user suggestions and other discovery methods. Turner says, "once a blog has established itself as a well-written and trustworthy source, we want to make sure it is included." The fact is, though, that if a blog Regator turns you on to then links to another related blog that's not included in the Regator index - you as a user cannot subscribe to it. If the company offered a "suggest" button next to its "share" button in the Regator browser, that could be helpful. Does that sound reasonable? It's not as free-form and dynamic as other services. Collected.info , a new service for sharing and subscribing to other peoples' collections of feeds, is a particularly interesting recent entrant into this market from perhaps the other end of the spectrum. Both services take a little time to get your reading list set up well, but Regator delivers high-quality content from the start. I like Regator and am already using the new iPhone app to discover interesting new content while on the go. A service that gives me access to fresh, high-quality content about ceramics, anthropology and museums with just a few clicks? Sign me up! Still, there's something about the sources available being limited by someone else's choice. It's an interesting tension that may never be resolved - but is the basis for some very interesting software in the meantime. The Regator crew is right to identify as a problem the way people new to this social web struggle to find the best content. They offer a compelling solution to the problem. Time will tell which solutions catch on and what the consequences will be. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank one of the companies that makes it possible for us to bring ReadWriteWeb to you. Groupsite is a long-developed, feature-rich, self-serve, professional grade social networking and collaboration service. If you've got a group of people you want to facilitate online conversation between - you should check out Groupsite. We really appreciate Groupsite's support here at ReadWriteWeb. Discuss

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An iPhone Remote for Reading the Blogosphere: Check Out Regator's New App

Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, LinkedIn today finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though - there's some good news and there's some bad news. LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have. Sponsor The Good News It's easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak - developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That's great news and not something that could have been taken for granted. The API allows search. That's great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you're connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet - but isn't that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn! Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who's information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we've seen so far is Salim Ishmael's Knx.to . That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it's definitely a keeper. The API uses OAuth . That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That's great. Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams . And Now For the Bad News... The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can't be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts' streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn't yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type - it's just a big stream of updates. LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn's Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but "integrating messaging isn't the goal, there's a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases." Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don't buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month , I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served. Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can't build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: "It appears that you can't create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com - but that's a very 5 years-ago approach to an API." "The signal from this is that they aren't encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples' professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition," Michels said. "LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model - get out of the UI business!" Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn's Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charing people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns. Finally, the terms of the API aren't very clear. Nash said they were a work in progress and likely to be changed. Some of those changes appear to have been made in the 3 hours since the API launched . Likewise, Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren't made explicit - only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit. Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told. Michaels may have said it best: "There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it's a bit disappointing." It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform - now let's see what happens. Discuss

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LinkedIn Finally Opens Platform: The Good & Bad News

The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. Sponsor This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web. We need to better understand our identity as it begins to define our experience of the Web and the networked-enabled world we inhabit. Our online identity will increasingly be defined by three "pillars": who I say I am, what I do and say, and who I connect to (and who connects to me). To clarify, our online identities are comprised primarily of three specific kinds of data: Explicit or prescriptive data (i.e. the data that I input about myself: name, age, occupation, etc.); Activity or behavioral data (i.e. what I do and say online); Relationship data (i.e. my social graph and what my connections say about me). If we consider the power of this pragmatic Web (a highly relevant and individualized Web experience based on the ubiquity of our identity data), we find that it not only impacts individual user experience, but that it opens up entirely new opportunities for business online. The future is not "business as usual." Business models will be based on what Elias Bizannes of the Data Portability Project calls the "information value network-economic value," derived from services that focus on activities with comparative advantage and that leverage free access to data. Consider this: as media companies scramble to identify new and innovative ways to advertise to the sea of nameless, pixeled users who graze through their content each day, a rich supply of highly valuable identity data lies just beneath the surface, left unmeasured and unmonetized. Facebook is nothing more than perhaps the largest single database of this kind of online identity data: explicit, activity and relationship data. With the development of Facebook Connect, which allows for the "open" exchange of Facebook user data between Facebook and third parties, Facebook could conceivably (and will) create an Facebook Connect ad network (read: data exchange), supplied by the valuable and highly targetable user identity data that is currently siloed on Facebook's servers. This identity data within Facebook is what makes the activity in "social media" so valuable. But the centralization of identity data on one or two major networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) won't realize the vision of the pragmatic Web. So, how will the pragmatic Web come to be? How do we realize the power of a dynamic Web that is based on our identities? We do so by empowering individuals to access and control their identity across any site or service, through standards that enable data portability and open Web inter-operability. The resulting vision is that of a highly personalized, dynamic, relevant and remixable Web experience, yielding greater access to information through discovery, communication and collaboration. For enterprise, this could mean the rise of innovative new business models, based on data-driven value exchange. One final note on identity data as it relates to enterprise. As Bizannes points out, the value of this kind of identity data rests on the key factors of time and timeliness. Essentially, identity data is valuable only if it is recent. Facebook wouldn't be able to sell your (permissions-enabled) data to advertisers if it used your explicit data from a year ago rather than from today. So, Bizannes argues that real-time "access" to someone's identity matters most, and it's no longer about data "capture." Thus, as new business models arise out of monetizing permissions-enabled identity data, the value of the business models will depend on these entities having real-time access to the data. Guest author: Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a digital strategist and Social Media Evangelist at iCrossing , a leading global digital agency. She is also the Communications Chair for the Data Portability Project and blogs about the social Web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com . Follow her on Twitter @alisamleo . Discuss

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The Future Is All About Context: The Pragmatic Web