If a huge news story breaks, where are you going to go first? Switch on the TV, try BBC News, CNN, maybe. But what if you are at work…….? Ok, let’s say a plane crashes into New York’s Hudson River? Like many the first port of call for such an event is the web. Now we all know that 90% of people are probably going to start at Google. The problem is Google has on average a 1-72hr spidering lag depending on the site in question and it’s links / authority. So, if Google hasn’t got anything, what next, Google News, BBC, CNN online versions. Fair enough, there might be a holding page with minimal details. Now consider this, if you had navigated to search.twitter.com on 15th January 2009, you would have seen this picture come up.

Hudson River Crash Photo From Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the real-time web.  Not only this, there were actual tweets from passengers on board the plane. A first hand account of what happened. Twitter is one of those things that polarizes opinion but it’s undoubtedly hit the news big time thanks in part to its popularity amongst celebrities. However some of the more clever applications have also demonstrated the real time web in action. In London last month we had about a foot of snow, which brought the country to a standstill, including the National Rail website. Fear not though, the Twitter account @uksnow was on hand to send through real time updates depending on your region and train service. Not just that but some clever folks used Twitters famously open API to build a snow map based upon people geo tagging snow reports. Now I’m not going to argue that Twitter is very much the premise of the early adopter / tech geek but it’s certainly ruffled a few feathers, enough to make Facebook try and buy them and to even open up their own Status Update API.

It’s not just Twitter taking advantage of the real time web though. Look at the Facebook / CNN tie up for Barack Obama’s inauguration. This was a great example of empowering me the user and my friends to watch a historic event and have a shared experience in an online environment. Now consider the iPhone, Flickr, Friendfeed, Google Latitude, Loopt. All great examples of the real time web.

So what next, is Google doomed, well clearly not. A good article by Read Write Web surmised it “Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else. It finds me after-the-fact reporting on major stories from major media companies. But it misses the real-time story. And that matters today”. I’m not sure about the last quote, “Google cannot, be real time”. Google’s mission is to index the world’s content no matter what that may be. However, they do at last seem to have a challenger on their hands.

What is clear is that Google is missing a trick at the moment, and Twitter is going to go from strength to strength for the time being. Simon Waldman wrote a good article in NMA magazine saying why should we all bash Twitter anyway, isn’t it a good thing that there’s a new kid on the block, something new to get excited about?

I’ll leave you with a quote from Robert Scoble, a long-time advocate of the real-time web, “there’s a new expectation that we’re having thanks to Twitter. We want everything now in real time. I want to see everything that was published now and respond to it now and I want to have conversations about all that in real time”. Take a look at Scoble’s live Friendfeed to see what he means.