Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

What does this mean for how we will come to consume information? John Borthwick from Betaworks has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity (Betaworks portfolio companies include Twitter, bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat, and Tumblr). He admits he and other investors are still feeling in the dark, but he describes the shift he is trying to capitalize on this way in a post titled “Distribution . . . now”:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.

In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration - yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed. No wonder AOL is sticking the stream in every part of its service, from its homepage to Bebo to AIM. (Yahoo is grappling with the emergence of the stream as well, but so far still thinks it can hold onto its place as a central traffic and distribution hub).

The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:

Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.

Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.

The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of teh notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)

During their annual Searchology event, Google announced a number of new updates to their core search product as well as a couple of new side projects.

Filtering

Users will now be able to filter results by content time, date, type, media, forum discussions, reviews and more. Whilst much of this has been available to users via Google’s advanced search page, the new features will be built into the core product offering.

Google will also offer the ability to view search results visually in a “wonder wheel” which illustrates the popularity of certain search terms and their related items.

Marissa Mayer has specified real time search to be Google’s most pressing and difficult challenge. Interestingly, startups OneRiot and Tweetmeme have made it their focus to search and index the real time web beginning with Twitter (neither of which are really real time search).

Google Squared

Google has also announced the launch of a Google Labs product called ‘Google Squared’ which lets users search for a particular topic and reveals a list of all information related to the topic - a vertical search engine of sorts. Results to Google Squares are presented so users can easily filter and remove certain results, leaving only the content you were looking for. Google Squared will launch in the next few weeks.

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It will come as no surprise but in the evening, Web users perk up.

According to a study by Lightspeed Research and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK), the largest percentage of UK Internet users in all age groups said they were most likely to pay attention to an online advertisement after 6 in the evening.

The likelihood of users to pay attention to advertising at other times varied slightly depending on age.

The later the day became, the more young adults were interested in online ads.

More older users said they were most likely to pay attention to ads from 9am to 12pm and from 2pm to 6pm, while the fewest indicated the lunch period.

Attention to ads also varied based on the activities users were engaged in. The greatest proportion of UK Internet users said they were very likely to process an ad while “researching the best deals,” followed by shopping, gambling and searching online.

The most people said they were not at all likely to notice online ads while e-mailing or instant messaging, followed by watching online video and playing online games.

Anyone with a son aged between 8 and 14 will appreciate this. Whatever did they do before XBox and Playstation?

Facebook’s battle with Twitter just got more interesting. Two months after its homepage redesign, Facebook’s iPhone application has caught up to the web version, and now features real-time updates.

This is actually a much bigger deal than it sounds. Facebook is clearly looking to take on Twitter with its recent focus on realtime and the way it allows celebrities to broadcast their updates to fans. And one of the key elements to Twitter’s success has been its mobile-friendly nature, allowing users to both update and see their friend’s updates just after they happen.

Facebook users have been able to submit photos and their status updates from their iPhones since last year. But until now, its iPhone app was stuck with the News Feed of Facebook past, displaying a handful of stories that were typically hours (and sometimes days) old. You could always browse over to the ‘Status Updates’ section to see more recent items, but they were never placed front and center.

We’re not sure when the new version went live (the changes appear to have been server-side), but the iPhone’s news feed now displays its first three items in ‘real-time’, while reserving the remainder of the feed for the ‘highlights’ - older items that it think you’ll be interested in. All real time updates appear to be limited to status messages - I’m not seeing any of the updates from applications or photos that I see in the web-based version.

This is probably only a taste of things to come. Facebook has a new iPhone application in the works, which is likely going to be timed to release alongside (or soon after) the launch of iPhone 3.0, and I suspect real-time will play an even more important role.

There have also been a few other subtle changes, like adding tiny profile images next to status updates (which actually makes the feed look almost exactly like FriendFeed’s current iPhone layout, seen below).

Source: TechCrunch