If 2009 was the year of real-time Web, with practically every major service finding ways to bring content to its users instantly, 2010 is about optimizing the new real-time world, expanding interoperability between sites, finding more ways for users' content to be discovered, and taking the potential of real-time out of the status world and into the real world. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, one panel asked if we were making serious progress in this vision, and if companies, feeling increased competitive pressures, are short-changing users in the process.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who moderated the panel, featuring representatives from Collecta, Google, Gowalla and Microsoft, said "the real-time Web is a big, complex and multi-headed beast," adding, "almost as many people you talk to on the subject will give a different perspective."

For most, the real-time Web represents reducing latency from the time updates are published and when they are experienced practically to zero. This can be anything from updates from blogs to downstream aggregators and RSS feed readers, status updates from social networks to other points in the ecosystem, or instant alerts from the Web at large that a saved search you requested has found a positive match.

But one of the existing problems with the real-time Web that has occurred is that despite the focus by many services to solve the same problem, many have done so without delivering true data interoperability - and other services are trying to solve for real-time without having full access to users' public data.

"Back in the day, you couldn't send e-mail from AOL to Compuserve, and today, you can't send data from Google Buzz to Facebook," said Brett Slatkin of Google's App Engine team, and co-author of Pubsubhubbub. "Part of what we are trying to work on is breaking down these barriers that connect to different sites. If I am on Buzz and Marshall is on Identica and Jack is on Twitter, we should all be able to communicate."

Standards have evolved in the real-time Web space, from OAuth to PubSububbub, WebFinger and Salmon (as documented here), but that's not to say there aren't still heated debates over these standards, or even which version of standards should be supported. (See this article for a discussion of OAuth 2.0)

"I try to be a practical person, and when I hear about a family of specifications, it sounds like a family of work," said Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft. "There is clearly a place where we have a common pain that we can work on. There is a bunch of shared pain, and the way you have to get real-time service is to work on APIs, and that is a clear starting point for standards. Pubsubhubbub can help solve that problem, but I get concerned when you have to implement certain specs to solve that problem."

"These specifications we agree on should be useful on their own," answered Slatkin. "When you implement a specification like HTML, you are not buying into an ideology."

As the real-time Web's protocols are debated and deployed, so too does the application of these services. Google Buzz and Facebook have received scrutiny for their aggressiveness in converting assumed private data to public, and Netflix recently canceled an algorithm development contest thanks to concerns of assumed privacy violations.

"When talking about privacy, right now, unfortunately, the social networking market is failing, and they have little incentive to encourage user privacy," said Obasanjo. "I am waiting to see when people find what they thought were private updates as part of trending topics on Google and Bing. Users and companies are in conflict."

Obasanjo gave the example of Twitter needing its users to be public in order to drive value into the system. After all, if users were all private, there would be no trending topics, and thus it is Twitter's best interests for updates to be public. "There is a factor that if a user wants to be private, it subtracts value from the system," he said.

Beyond these concerns, known benefits of the real-time Web are scratching the surface of what could be done with more expanded to real-time data from other sources, it was argued. Slatkin forecast a time where you could query supply chains for inventory and purchase locally instead of from Amazon.com, turning economies of scale on their head. Scott Raymond of Gowalla talked about intersecting real-time Web technologies with geodata to show trending locations and the hot parties of the moment, by decaying the relevance of checkins over time. Jack Moffitt, CTO of Collecta, said a development environment for new tools and applications that leveraged zero latency was becoming "very interesting".

"All these guys are working on realizing the potential right now, working on real-time data," Kirkpatrick said. "Brett Slatkin said it was important people focus on the unforseen future that systems we worked on to support undiscovered use cases - things are going to get real crazy real soon."

Web-wide adoption of RSS and Atom standards has eliminated the problem of publishers providing their data, and tools like Pubsubhubbub are working to get data from one site to another faster. "Polling doesn't scale and you need a push notification to deliver it. It's possible we will have multiple winners, and we have to consider privacy considerations that people won't want their data available to everyone," said Moffitt.

The element of real-time is being layered across the Web, and it seems to be happening even if developers aren't completely in agreement over the tools needed to optimize the experience or if the debates on privacy versus public data are solved. And there's a lot of room for real-time to grow outside of the statusphere and to more traditional markets. The question is can developers provide solutions that don't have users running to the FCC?

When the well-respected open source advocate Chris Messina announced he was joining Google in January, many folks were concerned that his being absorbed in to the big company Borg would mean a cessation or redirection of some of his projects targeting the next generation Web, possibly in exchange of proprietary efforts to promote the company's products. Today, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas, he spoke on how he and others in the community, both at Google and outside of it, are working to bring more meaning to our social networks, activity, and feeds, through extending today's data portability standards to include more information and more relevance. Messina walked through a history of the Web's publishing, from static portals of a decade ago, to today's RSS and Atom-powered sites, and suggested a future with even more information, based on streams, that tells a story.

Messina, after expressing his excitement about working with a team he believed was leading the industry in things he cares about, including the Data Liberation Front, letting data move from one site to another, said he was focused on what he called "generative structures" that were the underpinnings and DNA of how information is shared, updated and transmitted.

As he recounted, in 1999, portals ruled the Web, and people, myself included, would put their data in sites like My Netscape and My Excite, customizing these sites with headlines from third party services, primarily tapping RSS, which offered the headline of a story, a link and its description. In an era when publishers wanted to not give away their data, it was "the best we could do", he said. By 2005, a new extension of RSS was promoted, called Atom, which was still the essential concept of syndicating data from one Web site to another, but also adding an author and an identifier for the atomic bit of information.

Now in 2010, little has changed. Most news feeds of today, be they on Facebook, on customized portals, or the headline and link model that dominates Twitter, are fairly simple, and they don't indicate intent. As Messina said, "It's not all that different from the last 10 years, and that gets kind of depressing".

But what has changed is the increase of sharing rich media in these places, on platforms designed for "dead tree media". He said we should be able to show what we did, who with and why we were doing it, and that needs to happen through new richer formats for the social Web.

Activity Streams, an extension to the Atom Feed format, is looking to accomplish this by extending Atom and RSS with new aspects, including a verb and an object type. The world of FriendFeed, which supported a unified feed of 58 different services, where people could have one single stream that represented their identity online helped guide much of ActivityStreams' framework. As entries flowed to FriendFeed, they largely represented actions of posts, shares, bookmarks, reviews, from different sites. But ActivityStreams is aiming to do more than just syndicate data from one home page to another, as RSS and Atom have done for a decade, but also display intent and meaning.

"If your goal is to help people produce meaning, knowledge and culture, you have the basics for a pretty compelling social application and can motivate people to act," Messina said.

But with more streaming of information from many different sites, it can exacerbate the assumed problem of information overload - and tools need to be further developed to help us consume the data.

"We snack on information. It may feel like overload, but the tools haven't caught up," Messina said. "The solution to data overload is more metadata and we are at that point where can start generating that. We take the basic construct from 1999 and weave in some additional information - data about data."

As I outlined in my summary of DeWitt Clinton's talk on Google Buzz at the beginning of the month, Activity Streams are playing a big role in this new network, and these streams are intended to be open, not just for a company like Google, but other social networks that are tracking individual's activity and intent. The goal is to make discovery of intent data ubiquitous and transitive between sites, in the same way that RSS and Atom focused on publishing of data from one site to another.

Messina called the work on Activity Streams as iterative "baby steps", but ones that focus on getting today's rich media activity a home with a rich experience, and to make this process easy for service providers.

"If you have a Web site that has people doing things on it, and they have a feed they are taking with them, it is fairly trivial to add ActivityStreams information," he said. "Essentially we have the verbs and object types represented."

You can find out more on the continued development of ActivityStreams at http://activitystrea.ms.

Cadmus, the Twitter filter and conversation collector we have covered a few times on the site, has just introduced support for Twitter lists, providing personalized trending topics by list and conversations from that list, giving you an instant update as to what your friends or a specific group of friends are talking about on Twitter. Also, in parallel with the start of the SXSW Interactive 2010 event in Austin, Cadmus has created a dedicated page for speakers at SXSWi.

We've recently seen Twitter introduce trending topics by geography, a good move beyond the worldwide trending topics the company has featured since their acquisition of Summize in 2008. But the trending topics are not yet personalized for you, all those you follow, or by specific list. Cadmus takes these trends a step further with what they call "Personal Trending Topics" and yes, trends by each list you follow.

For me, the personal trending topics I see in Cadmus today are: "#sxsw, Twitter, sxsw, Austin, iPad, news, #media, iPhone, #ff and #followfriday".

If I change my view to the "TopTechBloggers" list, the trending topics for that list show me: "sxsw, #sxsw, iPad, Twitter, austin, #triout, iPhone, new post, #sbs2010 and #NCchevySXSW". Meanwhile, the "awesomesocial" list from Josh Elman is talking about: "#sxsw, austin, sxsw, #gdc, San Francisco, sf, new blog post, iPhone, #startupvisa and api".

So yes, clearly most of those people I follow and list are talking about SXSW.


Within each list, you can still see the grouped conversation that Cadmus is known for. I can see that Mathew Ingram of ReadWriteWeb got 11 responses to a recent query on Twitter, and see that Mashable continues to get 100+ retweets to most of their posts. But instead of seeing all 100, Cadmus groups them under the originating tweet to reduce the noise - as is their hallmark.

While you're checking out Cadmus' updates, also be sure to see their dedicated page for SXSW speakers here: http://thecadmus.com/topics/sxsw-speakers.

Behind only technology, sports, specifically baseball, is my true obsession. I've dedicated a good amount of my idle time and brain power over the last 20 years absorbing statistics and remembering the sport's lore, and for several years, before we had our twins, my wife and I had season tickets to the Oakland A's. In the months when baseball isn't played, it can get very frustrating to not have the regularity of the sport, the speculation on players and trades, and the daily contests. This offseason, I cheated a bit, thanks to Com2Us' game 9 Innings, on the iPhone. Though the game doesn't deliver highest-quality graphics or have the official blessing of Major League Baseball and the Players Association, it features practically every wrinkle of the game and is challenging enough to play again and again.


Like its sister game, Home Run Battle 3D, 9 Innings puts the bat in your hands and expects you to deliver results. But it's not just about hitting balls out of the yard in this game. Whether you choose an exhibition contest or start off a full 126-game season, you are expected to pitch, bat, steal bases, take a walk, and all those things that make the game of baseball a real pleasure.


Any sports games nut knows there are fine lines in the degree of difficulty for a game. You can make it too easy, practically guaranteeing a win every time out and rapidly becoming boring. Or, conversely, you can wrap a game in difficulty and odd combinations that eliminate the fun, as you rack up your losses. Whether on "Easy" mode or "Hard" mode, I have managed to be just good enough to feel competitive, and still growl in frustration as I popped up with the bases loaded, or saw my closer give up a 9th inning bomb to lose the game. And for every game I won by a margin of 5 or more, I have seen the 3-2 losses as well, that slipped away thanks to a misplaced pitch or mistimed swing.


Gameplay on the iPhone is relatively simple and intuitive. Instead of using a gamepad, like the Wii or Playstation, for example, 9 innings leverages a baseball diamond diagram for the up, down, left or right. You can move up or down to select pitches, and toggle left to right to determine pitch location. Hit OK to confirm and again to release the pitch. The better your timing, the better the location and chance for success. Similarly, when batting, you want to swing at pitches that get good wood on the ball and can pass by fielders.


Just like in the real game, there are good hitters and bad, fast and slow, those prone to strike out or ground into double plays. Some pitchers have more stamina than others, and a sometimes annoying manager will urge you to put in a relief pitcher or tell you it's okay to give up one or two runs if you've gotten the bases loaded and nobody out. There are errors and stolen bases, wild pitches and hit batsmen. And practically every activity is being recorded for statistics, by player, team and league-wide. Meanwhile, the game is also tracking your team's record and standings, and there is a short postseason.


In addition to the gameplay, you gain points for specific activity. The more difficult the activity, such as a three run homer, instead of a double play or three consecutive strikes, the more points you get. You can exchange these points to improve your coaches' ability, and theoretically, your winning percentage. This can lead to intentional hit batsmen to strand the bases full and garner points, or pulling a double steal with runners on the corners to rack up a theft of home.


Unlike a real baseball game, a 9 innings contest doesn't take 3 hours. It can take about 20 minutes for a full game, and as you can expect, it can take several weeks or a few months to wrap up a full 126 games, with dedicated playing. What it may lack in perfect management of defense, or cutting-edge graphics, it makes up for in sheer entertainment and bringing the most realistic flavor of the national pastime to the iPhone which I've seen. While I haven't turned my back on the real world of baseball in these cold winter months, it hasn't been that dramatic, thanks to having a methadone equivalent for my fix.

9 Innings costs $4.99 from Apple's iTunes Store. You can find it here, and it's worth the five bucks.