Later today, Digg will open up its rumored read/write API. Up until now, developers could only read data from Digg. With the new API, web and desktop apps will also be able to contribute data to Digg. This will allow developers to write desktop and web applications that enable users to, for example,

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

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

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!