There is a lot of hype surrounding the real-time web, and much of the feeding frenzy reminds me of the RSS space four years ago — though there is a lot of potential, there is also a lot of noise. How do you navigate through it all and which developments should you be paying attention to? What are the emerging trends for companies and entrepreneurs to watch for? Here are four real-time web trends that I’m tracking.

1. Real-Time Collaboration is Ripening

---

Real-time will play a major role in the future of online collaboration. We’ve seen all the hype around the new Google Wave platform, as well as the growth of Twitter and Twitter-like communications (such as Facebook status).  On the business side, SAP’s Gravity, a prototype of real-time collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave, is a good example. But I see this as the tip of the iceberg.

Companies that are more efficient have an advantage whether within their walls or with their customers. Imagine being able to make real-time changes with your colleague in another city and graphic designer at your local Kinko’s to finalize a presentation and print it hours before your meeting. Or working with your manufacturer in Nanjing, China on changes to your new BBQ grill design and seeing if it’s possible in real-time. Or game developers in Korea and Dallas story boarding a new video game concept in a new real-time game development application. There is massive potential for real-time collaboration across almost every discipline, and I believe there are an incredible amount of exciting possibilities here.

2. Real-Time Analytics Will Be Hot

---

The reality right now is that there isn’t enough critical mass of real-time data in most areas, but when those tipping points are met, watch this space. This is not just about Twitter feeds, but shopping information, individual health information, movie and show reviews, and many other treasure troves of data.

Waze, which is a crowdsourced mobile map and traffic information service, is effective in Israel where it initially launched and needed just 0.5% of the population to become a reliable service. It recently launched in the United States, and will be challenged to reach critical mass in its target markets for its product to be useful to end users, who provide the real-time data that is uses. While Waze is not necessarily an analytics application — it’s a real-time information app (though it does analyze the data it receives in real-time to expose traffic patterns, accidents, and speed traps to users), it is an example of necessary tipping points for analytics to be relevant.

Once you have these real-time data sets, so many fields will be able to become more accurate and relevant in their decision-making processes. What type of real-time data would you like access to?

3. Real-Time Search is Looking Up

---

With Microsoft’s and Google’s recent foray into real-time search, it would be easy to assume that real-time search startups are dead in the water. But I believe there are many opportunities for startups in the space, especially as public life streaming activities increase (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, IMs) and real-time search moves to vertical categories.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re wondering if you should you go see Depeche Mode in concert or if they are too old now to put on a good show. What are people saying about their concert from the evening before? If your search allows you to narrow your focus by date to make sure you’re getting info only from last night’s show, exclude all messages under 10 characters to filter out irrelevant information, and those from their home area of Basildon, Essex UK to rule out biases, you should be able to get a clear picture of what people think.

For the larger players, it will be a golden opportunity to capitalize on more event-driven ad dollars. Imagine the euphoria during the World Cup or Superbowl and all the tweets and messages surrounding these events. Now imagine the highly targeted ads that could be displayed to these users selling them championship videos or t-shirts at the height of their emotions. I’m still amazed by the uncanny targeting of ads within Gmail so it should be a short step for Google and other major advertising companies to be able to implement targeted ads across real-time streams.

4. Real-Time Ecommerce is Coming

---

German company Apnoti indexes real-time pricing for consumers in the U.S and Germany. The primary benefit of their service is to help consumers find dramatic price fluctuations and to take advantage of pricing errors on various ecommerce sites. But this is really quite elementary compared to what is possible. For true real-time pricing to occur, there needs to be real-time inventory management, which will depend on major infrastructure companies such as EDS or IBM to build out those systems. As retailers move closer to real-time inventory management, they’ll improve on their pricing and sales efforts since they will be able to create more efficient price equilibrium adjustments.

Microsoft’s latest effort to gain relevance in the search wars is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

According to All Things Digital, the company is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook to integrate status updates into its Bing search engine.

Details are expected to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit, but the stage has been building for this for some time. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook back in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been known to be exploring search partnerships for at least the past month, though it’s long been suspected that the company would eventually eye significant revenue in this space. Although Twitter has been said to be willing to offer a full stream of tweets to search providers on a non-exclusive basis, it would appear that Microsoft has beaten Google to the punch in making it happen.

In All Things Digital’s latest report, both of the leading social sites are said to be talking to Google, so Bing’s advantage may be short lived, though it will be “weeks, if not months” until we see any actual integration go live.

More to come …

Ever since Twitter announced it is working on a new Lists feature a month ago, users and developers have been awaiting its broad rollout. Over the past few weeks, Twitter has been expanding the number of people in the Lists beta, but now it appears that a full rollout is under way.

As of yesterday, Twitter employee Nik Kallen reported that “25% of all users have Lists.” And then he Tweeted: “We’re releasing lists to even more people. Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Twitter.”

Judging from the what we are hearing from tapped-in Twitter developers, the buzz on Twitter itself, and our tip box, a full rollout is under way and is expected to be completed either today or tomorrow. (Remember, this is Twitter, so there are no guarantees).

Why is everyone so excited about these Lists? Finally, you will be able to create groups of people you follow on Twitter. So if there are 10 or 20 people who consistently deliver good Tweets, you can separate them out from the rest of your stream and just listen to them. Or you can create lists by topic, people you actually know versus people you only know via Twitter, or any other category. And the cool thing about these Lists is that once somebody makes a good list, other people can follow that entire list, which makes it much easier to get started on Twitter. Because finding interesting people to follow is actually a lot of work.

Has Lists been turned on for you yet?

The Mozilla Firefox browser has just received an update, and you should probably download it if you want to protect your computer from nearly a dozen critical vulnerabilities.

Firefox 3.5.4, released earlier this morning, is being called a security and stability update. It doesn’t add new features, but instead directly deals with Firefox stability issues, fixes a few bugs (i.e. the ability to re-submit crash reports), and most importantly, patches up a group of security vulnerabilities.

And from reading the list of fixed security issues, we recommend you upgrade as soon as possible. Here are the security issues this version of Firefox patches:

- Crashes with evidence of memory corruption
- Upgrade media libraries to fix memory safety bugs
- Download filename spoofing with RTL override
- Cross-origin data theft through document.getSelection()
- Heap buffer overflow in string to number conversion
- Chrome privilege escalation in XPCVariant::VariantDataToJS()
- Heap buffer overflow in GIF color map parser
- Crash in proxy auto-configuration regexp parsing
- Crash with recursive web-worker calls
- Local downloaded file tampering
- Form history vulnerable to stealing

You can read more about this release and download the update in the Mozilla release notes.

Last week launched the social revolution for search. Microsoft’s Bing fired the first shot by announcing search deals with Twitter and Facebook and, at the Web 2.0 Summit, launching its Twitter integration. Google fired back almost immediately though, completing its own deal with Twitter and, perhaps more importantly, announcing a new feature: Social Search.

Social search, demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit by Google’s VP of Search Marissa Mayer, combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google with Google’s regular search results. The feature will go live this afternoon, and can be found within Google Labs.

The experimental feature, once activated, will display relevant search results from your social circle at the bottom of the search results page. This could be travel photos from your friends, a recent blog post, a set of status updates, or other information Google pulls.

For now, the feature is opt-in, only affects certain searches, and appear at the bottom of the search results page. However, we won’t be surprised if Social Search results start blending into regular search higher up the page. After all, your social circle is often far more relevant than even the top Wikipedia article on a subject. Google seems to betting on it in a big way.

Here’s a demo of social search from Google:

Did you tune into YouTube on Sunday to catch U2 performing live form the Rose Bowl? If you did, you had some serious virtual company.

The LA Times reports that Sunday’s show generated 10 million streams across 7 continents. The whole show was archived on YouTube Monday and has been viewed more than 1 million times since then.

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is calling the U2 concert the largest event in the company’s history and it very well could be a glimpse into what the GoogleGoogleGoogle-owned service plans in the future.

After all, it’s hard to make money off of short-form content, but with live streams, YouTube could potentially capitalize and maybe even come up with a payment model (a la Pay-Per-View) for really big events.

You can check out U2’s concert here:

So did you tune in Sunday night? What do you think about YouTube moving into live events? Would you pay to watch a live concert on YouTube? Let us know!

Tom might have been officially removed from power at MySpace, but he’s still officially a “friend” to millions of the site’s members. However, he’s now poking around the social network that supplanted his own as top dog: Facebook. At least in the world of satirical Facebook profiles.

Complete with pokes from Rupert Murdoch, wall comments from Mark Zuckerberg, and astute observations about the differences between Facebook and MySpace, Comedy.com [click for full img] has

Earlier this week we reported on a new type of Facebook scam making its way around the Web that masks itself as an email from Facebook but actually contains a virus as an attachment.

Today, Facebook has warned users of two different viruses that users should be aware of. The company writes “Watch out for two new viruses that are spreading across the web. They involve emails made to look like they are from Facebook telling you to take some action on your account. Remember that we will never send you a new password as an attachment.”

The company also advises users to visit its Security page for details on how to protect yourself and what do if you’ve been infected.

Have you been receiving fake Facebook emails? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook has just published a detailed roadmap of the features it expects to add to its Platform over the next six months, along with projected launch dates.

While the roadmap is intended largely for developers of applications – both on Facebook and on third-party sites and mobile apps using Facebook Connect – it gives users an idea of how we might interact with these apps in the future.

Some pieces that sound intriguing:

The Open Graph API will allow any page on the web to have all the features of a Facebook Page – users will be able to become a Fan of the page, it will show up on that user’s profile and in search results, and that page will be able to publish stories to the stream of its fans.

Email: Developers will be able to ask users to share their primary email addresses (for example, firstname.lastname@domain.com).

Notifications: Application-to-user and user-to-user notifications will be removed, and instead developers will use stream, Inbox, and Email.

We’re still digesting the roadmap and will update with details, but in the meantime, you can check it out for yourself on Facebook’s developer wiki.

When first starting a blog, choosing which blogging platform to use is one of the most important decisions that you can make as a new blogger. The right platform can make blogging a breeze, and the wrong platform can make blogging a chore.

Because the platform that you use to blog with is such a powerful part of your blogging experience, it is well worth putting in the time to find a platform that provides your ideal balance between a user-friendly interface and a flexible framework that allows you to make your blog look and feel unique.  If you are planning on blogging for profit, then I would recommend getting a hosted account at someplace like godaddy. Finding the right platform isn’t always easy, but with a little bit of contemplation and a little bit of research, you will be on your way to finding the perfect blogging platform.

If you are new to blogs and to internet technology, you might want to sacrifice the ability to create a custom background design or to integrate a unique font into your template in order to find a program that will be easy for you to use. On the other hand, if you are a veteran web designer with knowledge of html or javascript, you will probably find the limitations of a user-friendly platform to be frustrating.

Blogging Platforms

There is no such thing as a blogging platform that is objectively the best platform, because every blogger has unique needs. The blogging movement is very much about individuality, so it makes plenty of sense that there would be many different platforms available that are designed to meet the needs of different kinds of individuals undertaking different kinds of projects. This diversity is a good thing, because it means that you will almost certainly be able to find a program that suits your level of technical aptitude. However, the fact that no two bloggers need the same thing from a blogging platform can make your search for the right platform a bit tricky.

Here are some blog platforms to consider:

• http://blogger.com
• http://wordpress.com
• http://typepad.com
• http://livejournal.com

There is no such thing as the perfect platform for everybody, so instead of looking for the “best” platform, look for the best platform for your specific criteria.