What Do You Hate About the Real-Time Web?

We just spent a whole day talking about the real-time web a the RWW Real-Time Web Summit. While the general mood was obviously extremely upbeat, a few sessions at the conference also focused on some of the questions that still remain to be answered. Brizzly‘s Jason Shellen, for example, asked us what we hated about the real-time web, while Stinky Teddy’s David Hardtke focused on how we can make sure that information on the real-time web is credible.

Questions That Still Need to be Answered?

Here is a small selection of the issues that were raised about the current state of the real-time web:

How do we know a user is credible? On the real-time web, we are obviously looking for speed, but that speed obviously comes at a cost. While traditional search engines can rely on PageRank-type algorithms that can give us an idea that a source is credibly and trusted, the real-time web’s focus on speed makes this highly impractical. Once we start filtering data, we automatically lose some of the real-time aspects.

Are we trading in freshness for quality? Is quicker really always better and is less really more? After all, how often is the instant timeliness of the real-time web actually really useful?

How can we filter the real-time web? How, for example, can we filter out the most boring people (even though there is social pressure to follow all your friends)? How can we find the most interesting stories? And how can we weed out spam?

Even though many questions were asked about the real-time web and even though many questions remain to be answered, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the overall feeling was that the real-time web will soon be a normal part of everybody’s experience of the Internet. Now, all we need to figure out how we can extract the most value out of it without being completely overwhelmed by information overload, getting spammed by scammers, or bored to death by those of our friends who feel the need to tweet about what they had for breakfast.