We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product. The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned. Sponsor The new product is based on Collecta's site search platform and MySpace's real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, tit returns a filterable, streaming gallery of collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users. Based on IM protocols, Collecta's search platform pushes out content in real time as it's published. Each result also includes the poster's "mood," which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis. "Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light," said MySpace COO Mike Jones. "Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users' moods and activities. It's great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web." Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, "MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn't see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like 'happy' is incredibly fascinating." In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace. Collecta's general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well. MySpace's partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta's site search, but it's far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website. Discuss

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MySpace Taps Startup Collecta for Real-Time Search

We've been keeping an eye on super-simple feed reader Lazyfeed for about six months now. Cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng wrote us today to let us know about some exciting changes users will see tomorrow morning when the startup launches Lazyfeed Squared, the second version of the product. "In our previous version," he said, "users had to click on updated topics to see what's inside. That is not lazy. And it wasn't fun enough. With the new version, it's not just the topics that update - each topic has its own live updates which show the latest headlines along with images." Sponsor In days of yore , users would type in a tag or single-word search term, and LazyFeed would return videos, photos and blog posts tagged with that term. Users were then prompted to add that term as a topic, which essentially meant the search was saved. The UI looked like a typical feed reader: In September, the site announced support for both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, making the product even quicker, in some cases as fast as an IM client. Lazyfeed Squared retains the real-time capabilities of the previous version, but it's a more passive experience, like watching television. "It delivers updates (updated content) of updates(updated topics)," said Gahng. "You don't even need to flick a finger to see what's up with your topics. You can just add stuff and watch live content flow in." Lazyfeed has also eliminated the need to sign up to use the service. "This will make it much easier to recommend Lazyfeed to your friends," said Gahng. "We think this will greatly make Lazyfeed more approachable for first-time users." Discuss

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Lazyfeed Gets Even Lazier: Users Get TV-Like Feed Reader

The newest premium research report from ReadWriteWeb is available for purchase and download now. Titled The Real-Time Web & its Future , the report is based on 50 interviews with engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time web technology. This is about far more than Twitter and Facebook. From a little startup called Nozzl Media delivering real-time public records to newspaper websites, to Aardvark's building a "real-time web of people" using social networks and IM, to the way the Red Cross uses the real-time web to save lives - this report will give you a broad and deep understanding of the state of the real-time web, directions things might go in the future and some of the key personalities advancing these technologies. Sponsor Compared to traditional analyst reports, we believe this product is more affordable, more in-depth and more effectively forward-looking than anything you'll find elsewhere. The report features: In-depth case studies of 10 organizations leveraging real time in a way that illustrates best practices or demonstrates inspiring innovation. Examples include: Warner Bros. Records, The American Red Cross and Superfeedr. Profiles of 20 people you should know and understand in order to understand and participate effectively in this market. People like John Borthwick, Ron Conway, Chris Messina, Monica Keller and Brett Slatkin. Sector overviews of the most heavily populated parts of the real-time web: search, stream readers and text-analysis middleware. Charts, graphs, visualizations and more. You can download the Table of Contents and a sample chapter at no cost, to get a feel for what's included. This report represents the best wisdom from thousands of hours of industry experience, compressed through hundreds of hours of interviews, now available to help you get a jump-start in this big new direction the web is moving in. 84 compact pages of research, all for a mere $300. Below is a matrix of big issues discussed in various parts of the report. We trust you'll find this research an invaluable resource. Purchase The Real-Time Web & its Future here. Discuss

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Now Available: The Real-Time Web & its Future

We're excited to announce that our latest premium research report will be available for download on Monday! Titled The Real-Time Web and Its Future , the report is a broad and deep look at the emerging world of real-time technology on the web. Based on 50 interviews with companies, engineers and executives building or leveraging real-time technology - the subtitle of this report could very well be "Real-Time, Beyond Twitter and Facebook." Social networks, infrastructure providers, media companies, non-profits and financial services companies were all interviewed and will all find this report useful to quickly develop a sophisticated understanding of this important trend on the web. Large portions of the web will be operating in real-time and this report will provide you with an important competitive advantage. You can pre-order the report at a $100 discount here ; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF) below. Sponsor There is so much work being done around push delivery of messages - messages between people, between websites and people and between machines and machines - that it's impossible to capture the whole market. What we've done is develop in-depth case studies of 10 companies that are illustrative of general trends or have wildly innovative strategies. We've profiled twenty four key people to watch in order to understand the future of real time. We've done overviews of three of the biggest sectors in this market - search, stream readers and filtering/text analysis. And we offer five visualizations to help you understand the issues and strategies. This report captures the wisdom of thousands of hours of work with real-time technology by people breaking new ground - then it was distilled down through hundreds of hours of interviews, research and writing by ReadWriteWeb staff and hundreds of Real-Time Summit attendee conversations. Now you can purchase the report and get an in-depth understanding of this emerging trend in just a few hours of reading and for a bargain price of $200 by pre-order, or $300 next week. Pre-order today and you'll receive a link to download the 60+ page PDF on Monday, November 30th. For your perusing pleasure we offer today the Table of Contents and one full sample chapter for download. Or, check out this excerpt from that sample chapter below. Ted Roden Brings the Real-Time Web to the NY Times and EnjoysThings By day, Ted Roden works at the very top floor of the New York Times building, in the R&D department. The Times has a great team of engineers; they do cutting edge work in APIs, data visualization and computer assisted reporting. Roden does work with real-time data at his day job, but he gets full creative freedom when working a side-project called EnjoysThings . The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating: the material benefits of going real time the importance of user experience the changing landscape in analytics and advertising We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure. EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site's developments and the service is a lot of fun to use. This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content. One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That's remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive. The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the browser as soon as it's shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he's using the open source infrastructure Tornado , from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times. EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could likely be incurred by sites of any size. 1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE "People leave it open all day long," Roden said of the sidebar. "Time-on-site has seen a huge increase. It's like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it's about to pop in 5 seconds you'll stick around." There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is. 2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that "my site runs a lot more smoothly, I'll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it's much easier on the database for me." "I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I've reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down." Roden's experience compliments the story that Google's Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth. ...(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download above. Please see also the Table of Contents and pre-order now to get a great discount on the forthcoming report! Discuss

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The Real-Time Web and Its Future: Sample Chapter, Table of Contents Available Now!

Having just launched a new real-time mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot only weeks ago, mobile search company Taptu is now expanding their revamped service to the Android platform. Today, they're launching a new application designed specifically for Android phones running version 1.5 and above. Like their brand-new mobile website , Taptu for Android includes real-time search results thanks to OneRiot integration. It also offers a touchscreen interface for viewing the results without having to pinch, resize, or refocus the screen. Sponsor The new application is the first Taptu app for Android which is why it doesn't include the social sharing features (share to Twitter and Facebook) that the iPhone app currently offers. Those will be added in a future release, notes the company . However, nearly everything else about the new Android application is the same as its mobile counterpart , including its search verticals of "web," "images," and "buzz" which sit above Taptu's search box on the app's main screen. The "buzz" section contains real-time results pulled from sites like Twitter and Digg as well as from other social sharing websites, blogs, and data pulled from select panel of internet users who have downloaded the OneRiot toolbar and are anonymously sharing their web-browsing data with the company. This aggregate information is actually the most prominent source of real-time data for OneRiot's search service. As of September of this year, OneRiot claimed to have 3 million active toolbar users out of the 20 million or so who have downloaded the toolbar to date. Meanwhile, they're indexing around 20,000 links from Digg and 5 million from Twitter. It's this data which powers Taptu's "buzz" section where you can find breaking news and other currently "hot topics" being discussed on the web. And unlike Twitter's trending topics, for instance, OneRiot doesn't link to raw tweets but to the actual news stories and blog posts that are sharing the information. The main Taptu homepage also links to these trending items by way of a tag cloud whose colorful blue bubbles take you directly to the buzz section when tapped. If you're interested in trying the new Android application, you can download a free copy from the Android Market on your mobile phone. If you don't own an Android device (or iPhone ), you can still use Taptu via its mobile website available at www.taptu.com . Discuss

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Taptu Brings Real-Time Search to Android