Comments on: When does NOW matter?

By: Quora

Quora — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:55:55 +0000

What is the type of messages best suited to real-time web?…

I wrote a blog post called ‘When does NOW matter?’ (http://www.leggetter.co.uk/2010/03/10/when-does-now-matter.html) about this just over a year ago. I’m continuing to build a project called Kwwika so it’s obviously key to determine when real-time …

By: The death of F5 | Innovation Focus Scotland

The death of F5 | Innovation Focus Scotland — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:42:15 +0000

[...] Kwwika is a cloud-based service that makes it easy for anybody to add real-time data to any web page, web site, Rich Internet Application (RIA), desktop or service application. We also make it easy for anybody to publish and share their real-time data. We are providing a service for “when now matters”. [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:06:17 +0000

Great post Phil – our game revolves around every action in a football match, every pass, every tackle, every shot, every interception etc. There is an action about once every couple of seconds so for us NOW really matters!
Keep fighting the good fight (the real-time one)!

By: Marc Labuhn

Marc Labuhn — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:31:52 +0000

I would argue that real time is only ever required if there is an interactive element to the information, i.e. any time your reactions to an event may influence the outcome.

Notifications about live events that you cannot influence need to arrive in sync with the primary information, but most of the time, a recording of both replayed in sync at a later time are indistinguishable from the live event from the viewer’s perspective.

The other examples you list in your post are specific examples of this general idea; betting, trading, collaboration – in each case, real time matters because you play an active role in shaping the outcome of the event.

I for one still prefer to see information like news or documentaries presented in a form that has been processed and refined, rather than a never-ending stream of raw, unprocessed (but real time) data.

By: Nick Smith

Nick Smith — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:20:23 +0000

Reading this made me remember a great BBC Horizon documentary called 'Do you now what Time it is?' - good clip from it here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KuJxcjYyDg . It's pretty tricky to actually define what time itself is - and many smart people have said that time is relative for each person experiencing it. Maybe the 'real-timeness' of something (a notification, opportunity, tweet and so on) is less important than how that something exists relative to the person experiencing it... Maybe different people need different definitions of 'real time' applied to them individually - i.e my real time can be different to your real time, or my grandparent's real time. Anyway, I agree, there are big opportunities for taking the concept of real time further, and interestingly Google seems to consider real-time a priority too regarding the indexing of content...http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_developing_real_time_index.php