Meteor dev here. I share your frustration. It's tough to find words to explain these systems that most people will understand. We managed to keep "realtime" off

Meteor dev here. I share your frustration. It's tough to find words to explain these systems that most people will understand. We managed to keep "realtime" off of the meteor.com page :) but we let it slip into the HN story title. That's because some smart people told us that readers scan HN headlines for keywords, and that "realtime" was the word that they were mostly likely to pick up on. I hope that soon we have an appropriate set of words for these new systems. Interestingly, most of the core Meteor team has worked on systems that you might consider "actually" realtime: I wrote machine vision software that watches a few dozen cameras and tracks objects moving between them, Nick wrote software defined radio code that runs inside rural cell towers, Matt wrote kernel drivers for high performance IO interconnects.