3 ms·

Can I ask a non-technical question about analysing the real-time web... What's the business benefit? I don't think enough happens 'real time' for it to make mu

by smiler 17y ago

Can I ask a non-technical question about analysing the real-time web... What's the business benefit? I don't think enough happens 'real time' for it to make much of a difference - reading a few blogs, news websites, digg / reddit & trending topics on twitter is enough to catch up on what happened in the world in a day. Has anyone actually thought of anything that could make this useful?

fleitz 17y ago
If you can correlate "real-time web" trends to market movement there is a lot of money to be made.
jgrahamc 17y ago
Has anyone actually thought of anything that could make this useful? Yes. This is part of what we are doing at http://causata.com/ http://causata.com/. Understanding the actions of people in near-real time is important if you want to target them with the right information, ads, offers, etc.
- FreeRadical 17y ago
  But why does this have to be real time and not, say, 4 hours delayed? If a person is interested in soccer at 8am, then they probably still are interested in soccer later in the day. I'd be interested to hear any counter examples.
  - leej 17y ago
    it means you can display a soccer-related ad at 8am and know that he will be watching it.
    - FreeRadical 17y ago
      But this occurs already with ad networks and has been going on for years, they track your previous behaviours and delivery 'relevant' ads.
dvd03 17y ago
There are two companies which seek to provide real-time high volume analysis of data streams as a service: Truviso and StreamBase. The target clients for both are principally, apparently, companies seeking to crunch financial data in quasi real time.
ramanujan 17y ago
The realtime web is basically about breaking news. That's a significant proportion of search queries, perhaps 20-30% (you can quantify with the AOL query dataset). I don't personally care so much about 5000 Tweets saying "Michael Jackson RIP". That's ultra-mainstream breaking news that you would hear about anyway. Instead the interesting thing about Twitter is that it's gotten big enough to explore the tail of breaking news in areas I care about, e.g. conferences and events that I want to follow without being present. A lot of that stuff would never make a full news piece or journal article, but is important to gauge attitudes and trends. Basically it reduces the threshold of a "least publishable unit", and in doing so unlocks a large amount of breaking news that would not otherwise get out there.

by smiler 17y ago

fleitz 17y ago

If you can correlate "real-time web" trends to market movement there is a lot of money to be made.

jgrahamc 17y ago

Has anyone actually thought of anything that could make this useful? Yes. This is part of what we are doing at http://causata.com/ http://causata.com/. Understanding the actions of people in near-real time is important if you want to target them with the right information, ads, offers, etc.

FreeRadical 17y ago
But why does this have to be real time and not, say, 4 hours delayed? If a person is interested in soccer at 8am, then they probably still are interested in soccer later in the day. I'd be interested to hear any counter examples.
- leej 17y ago
  it means you can display a soccer-related ad at 8am and know that he will be watching it.
  - FreeRadical 17y ago
    But this occurs already with ad networks and has been going on for years, they track your previous behaviours and delivery 'relevant' ads.

dvd03 17y ago

There are two companies which seek to provide real-time high volume analysis of data streams as a service: Truviso and StreamBase. The target clients for both are principally, apparently, companies seeking to crunch financial data in quasi real time.

ramanujan 17y ago

The realtime web is basically about breaking news. That's a significant proportion of search queries, perhaps 20-30% (you can quantify with the AOL query dataset). I don't personally care so much about 5000 Tweets saying "Michael Jackson RIP". That's ultra-mainstream breaking news that you would hear about anyway. Instead the interesting thing about Twitter is that it's gotten big enough to explore the tail of breaking news in areas I care about, e.g. conferences and events that I want to follow without being present. A lot of that stuff would never make a full news piece or journal article, but is important to gauge attitudes and trends. Basically it reduces the threshold of a "least publishable unit", and in doing so unlocks a large amount of breaking news that would not otherwise get out there.