The real time web

Social networks ‘are new e-mail

Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.

“We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0,” David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.

At South by Southwest now there have been so many updates made by cell phones that the AT&T 3G network is unable to keep up. One noticeable trend, there are fewer notebooks this year and more mobile devices. Most of them are posting to sites like Twitter and Facebook. Why? Because it’s real time. When something happens anywhere, it hits the real time web first. There are any number of search and filtering tools to help you track what’s happening too.

Consider what Jeff Barr, Lead Web Services Evangelist at Amazon says

I’ve been on Twitter since the end of 2006. In that time it has grown from a curiosity to a plaything to a valuable part of my business and personal life. I can’t even begin to fully enumerate the number of different ways that it has been of value to me.

He uses TweetGrid to track in real time what people are saying about six facets of Amazon Web Services. But this isn’t just for geek stuff.

DJ, who posts and comments here, makes goat cheese on his ranch in Utah. A Twitter search for “cheese making” shows a number of other cheese makers out there. You can reply to them and get a conversation going. Or check their profile and see if they have a website about it.

Social networks are not just the new email, they are also the new search engine. And a way to build traffic to websites and blogs as Jesse Newhart, who did the following video, discovered when it got linked to from Twitter by Mashable. He got thousands of hits.

Jesse discusses in the video and on his blog how to use TweetDeck, an amazing, free tool that makes monitoring what’s happening on Twitter easy and simple. He follows over 15,000 people using it. I just started using TweetDeck and highly recommend it too.

I’ll be posting more about Twitter, including useful websites and tools to help you use it more effectively.

We are witnessing a paradigm shift on the Internet. The real time web is emerging and will eventually supplant and replace some existing technologies. I increasing use Twitter and Facebook to send messages rather than email. Twitter search brings more timely results than does Google. It is significant that the CEO of Google has made faintly mocking comments about Twitter lately, maybe they see what’s happening and aren’t sure what to do about it. No, Google will never go away, nor do I want it too, but the real time web will increasingly compete for and replace some (much?) of what they do.