Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant » truly real-time

When does NOW matter?

Phil Leggetter — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:31:42 +0000

Real-Time Web!

Like me you may well be fed up of hearing and seeing this term. However, I’m guessing that you’ll be fed up for a different reason to me. I’m actually very excited about the real-time web (I’m sure you’ll have noticed) but I want to see it used as more than just a buzz term. I want to see real-time used in the true sense of the term – to mean that something has happened within the last few milliseconds. I want it to mean that the tweet you are reading, the picture you are viewing, the status update you are reading, the event you are being notified of is happening NOW.

Google no longer takes days to index a web site or find a new blog post. For things like blog posts, new web sites, certain types of news and future events it doesn’t really matter if we only find out about them within hours of their availability. But with other things such as live events, breaking news and opportunities, seconds, and sometimes milliseconds, really do matter.

When does instant real-time matter? When do you need to be informed that something is happening now? When do seconds, or even milliseconds, really matter?

Here are a few examples that I can think of:

Live events – notifications related to live events completely lose their context if they are delivered too late. With live events seconds matter. If there is a system using the live event notifications, such as a betting platform them milliseconds matter. As soon as a goal is scored in a football match betting needs to be temporarily stopped until the odds can be updated to take into account the new scoreline. A good example of this is PickLive Football (previously Football 3′s).
Alarm notifications – If you have a system hooked into your house alarm, or a power system alarm then delivery of the alarm notification needs to be instantaneous so that it can be quickly acted upon. So, a firm such as AlertMe would probably be very interested.
Opportunities – If you check in to a cafe using a platform such as Four Square or Gowalla then there is a finite amount of time during which that location update will be valid. During that time there is opportunity for people to meet up with you. Another example might be that an unscheduled event is all of a sudden is taking place. Without instant notification of that event you would miss it.
Collaboration and communication – Good examples of this are instant messaging and Google Wave. I’m sure there are loads of other platforms out there where instant updates are required to ensure that people aren’t left waiting for a reply and don’t spend time composing a replies that are irrelevant or out of date.

I’d love to get your feedback on this so please leave you comments and ideas below.

The ChristmasCrunch nearly real-time web event

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:07:37 +0000

On the 15th of December I’m going to the ChristmasCrunch. It looks like a really good event with Iain Dodsworth and James Whittaker of TweetDeck giving the keynote on “Where the biggest realtime desktop application goes next” (I know where I’m hoping it goes. See below). Other presentations include Jenni Lees of Festbuzz, Marco Kaiser of Seesmic, Mario Menti of Twitterfeed, Mark Rock of AudioBoo, Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme, Daniel Tenner of Woobius, Willian Fischer of Twitter Jobsearch and Tim Morgan of Mint Digital. And if that’s not enough there’s also a startup pitch (startup pitches – grrrr…) and an after party.

My main interest in this event is to see if anybody is going to start delivering a “truly real-time” experience to users. Will TweetDeck still be making polling requests to the various services it uses to check if any more data is available or will they move to using PUSH technology? Are other companies going to start adopting PUSH to give the user a truly real-time web experience?

I’ve already mentioned my opinion time and time and time again that what we presently see as the real-time web isn’t in fact giving any of us a truly real-time experience, and this won’t be the case until data is pushed to us in real-time. If we have to actively check to see if there is new data available then how can anybody claim that we are receiving data in real-time? As soon as the new data is available we should not only be informed about that new data, but also given it.

Let me use Google search as an example: Google is getting really good at almost instantly picking up new content on the web – what everybody is calling the “real-time web” experience. I’ve also observed that it looks like they’ve started to rank new content higher, so they are really embracing and valuing the freshness of information. If I were to go to Google.com and search for “Real-Time Rich Internet Applications” I’d get a number of relevant and potentially fresh results.

If just after Google returns these results to me Robert Scoble decides that RTRIAs are the next big and publishes a blog post on the subject, leading to a number of other blog posts and tweets, I’d be none the wiser until I resubmit my search to see the updated results. Google would no doubt pick up this new, high profile bloggers, blog post and it would be available, maybe even top in the search listings, when I next searched for “Real-Time Rich Internet Applications”. But, I’ve done my search and I’d believe that I have got the most relevant information available at that moment so my search results would be out of date.

Until companies move away from the old PULL web model and move to PUSH we are going to be stuck with a nearly-real-time web experience. I hope I get the opportunity to ask a few people at the ChristmasCrunch about when, not if, they will be moving to a PUSH model to deliver a truly real-time web experience to their users.

Why Comet is key to the Truly Real-Time Web

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:01:57 +0000

A lot of websites use HTTP Polling to update data on on their website or application without the need for the user refreshing the website. This is clearly better than a purely static page, but during the time between each poll the data on the page has the potential of being out of date (stale) so to make a decision based on the information on a potentially stale page can be a risky one.

The normal example given to show the benefits of using Comet to achieve full HTTP streaming and the importance of non-stale data is of a trader making a trade on an out of date price. Another example is given where a person places a bet using odds that are on screen but do not match up with the odds in the betting system.

I just read a post on Comet Daily about a company called Frozen Mountain who have just released a component that adds Comet Support for IIS. Along with this they’ve released a video which doesn’t cover the standard example.

It’s possible that in this example that a polling solution might actually be just as suitable but this is a good demonstration of the benefits of Comet. In the example Comet provides almost instant feedback on the number of available tickets to potential buyers. This has two benefits. The first is that the user (Bob in the video) has less of a chance of missing out on his tickets. The second is more of a commercial benefit in that the user gets instant feedback on the popularity of the event and availability of the tickets and is more likely to make an instant purchase.

Until a solution such as Comet is used the data that a user sees, in a event booking, trading, betting or even search system, cannot be classed as part of the truly real-time web.