And, indeed, what does real-time mean for mobile?
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Christmas Crunch in Camden - an event organised by tech site TechCrunch Europe to discuss the real-time phenomenon. Y'know: Twitter, status updates, geolocation data... that kind of thing.
Ironically given the subject matter, it's the first conference I've been to in a while where I wasn't liveblogging furiously. Instead, it was a chance to listen to a bunch of speakers and panels, and try to figure out what this buzz around real-time means for the mobile industry.
Here's a few thoughts:
1. Real-time is already a mobile thing, but people need tools to make sense of it all
This is pretty obvious: people using services like Twitter and Facebook want to access them on their phones, as real-time updates aren't much use if you can only get them when on a computer.
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It's equally clear, though, that once you have a big feed of data - Twitter particularly - it becomes even more of a challenge to make sense of it on mobile. Small screen, bitesize usage sessions, etc. All the stuff you know well.
So it's also clear that many of the tools helping people make sense of their feeds, like TweetDeck and Seesmic, are firmly focused on mobile as one of their 'key screens' to target. If anything, being able to sort and segment your real-time feeds is more important on a phone than on a desktop.
2. Mobile real-time actually has more of a business model right now
Listening to people from the various real-time companies talk felt disturbingly similar to the original dotcom bubble back in the late 90s. It's all about grabbing market share, attracting eyeballs, and making cool technology.
Which is nice, but what about making money? The standard response is 'we have some interesting ideas on that... but we can't share them'. Which cynical minds may translate as 'We're hoping Twitter/Google/Facebook/Someone will buy us before the money runs out'.
That said, there's some evidence that consumers will pay for real-time on their phones where they wouldn't on their PCs. Tweetie is one example of a great Twitter app for iPhone that people pay for, for example - even if TweetDeck and Seesmic aren't charging for their mobile apps.
3. Phones are really important as generators of real-time data.
Something that also came through yesterday is the increasing importance of mobile for generating real-time content, not just consuming it. People tweeting on the go (or sitting in front of The X Factor chipping into the Twitter backchannel), the famous Hudson River plane-crash Twitpic, Facebook status updates and photo uploads... And so on.
But one speaker, David Maher Roberts from The Filter, explained the other benefit of mobile devices. Besides generating 'explicit' data - those tweets, photos and status updates - they also generate 'implicit' data, which is attached to them. Someone's location being the prime example, thanks to Twitter's new geolocation API.
There are numerous tools and services emerging to start analysing both kinds of data - one example given was music firms identifying tweets about a band (say, Radiohead) made from a specific location (the gig they're playing right now) and curating those into some kind of dedicated feed.
4. Real-time feels important, even if it's not going to make shedloads of money for many companies in its space.
One of the best comments of the whole day came from Eileen Burbridge of VC firm Ambient Sound Investments. It's not particularly mobile, but it's worth reproducing in full nonetheless:
"I think the commercial opportunities have yet to be realised, appreciated or even investigated. I see it more as a cultural shift with respect to how people are communicating, engaging and making themselves more transparent. I'm not sure that's immediately translating to a business need, or something that people will pay for."
She compared it to the early days of email - email itself has become a big important communication mode, but the companies making email clients like Eudora didn't become huge moneymaking machines (although Eudora itself did get sold to Qualcomm, interestingly).
5. So...
Anyway, what's clear is that we're in the very early stages of this real-time trend/bubble, with plenty of innovation to come - much of which will be relevant to the mobile industry.
Whether it's people sharing their location with friends via Foursquare, Nokia attaching Ovi Map links to people's status updates, Vodafone 360's social address book, more sophisticated Twitter clients and tools, or livestreaming apps from the likes of Ustream and Qik - it's a big, significant, interesting trend.
Just don't mention the money thing yet...
