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Posts Tagged ‘Real Time View’

Case Study: The Real-Time Web at the New York Times & EnjoysThings

This Monday we’re releasing our latest premium research report, entitled The Real-Time Web and Its Future. You can pre-order this in-depth report for just $200.

One of the 50 interviews we conducted was with Ted Roden, a Creative Technologist at The New York Times. In this post, an edited extract from our new report, we explore how Roden works with real-time data at The Times. We also discuss the creative real-time development he’s doing on a side-project called EnjoysThings.

Pre-order now: The Real-Time Web and Its Future, $200 if you order before 30 Nov; check out the Table of Contents (PDF) and a sample chapter (PDF).

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The primary contributions Ted Roden makes to understanding the real-time web include articulating:

• the material benefits of going real time
• the importance of user experience
• the changing landscape in analytics and advertising

We had a conversation with Roden about what happened after he added a real-time feed to EnjoysThings; he articulates well some of the biggest advantages of a real-time infrastructure.

EnjoysThings is a visual bookmarking site, like Delicious for images and other media. Even text snippets bookmarked are highlighted visually. User experience is a key consideration in all the site’s developments and the service is a lot of fun to use.

This summer Roden added a premium subscription option to the site, called Joy accounts. Joy accounts cost $20 per year for access to all the current and forthcoming premium features, or users can pay $5 for a single premium feature like disabling ads on the site or being able to view NSFW content.

One of the features Joy account holders get is access to a real-time view of new content shared. That real-time stream can be viewed in any browser but may be best served up via a Firefox sidebar. A real-time feed as up-sold value add? That’s remarkable and Roden says the response has been positive.

The sidebar is simple but compelling. New content is pushed live into the side of the browser as soon as it’s shared on the site, including images. At first Roden said he used AJAX set to poll his site every few seconds. Then he switched to a Comet implementation. He says he’s using the open source infrastructure Tornado, from Facebook, for his real-time prototypes at the Times.

EnjoysThings is still very small but the implications of adding real-time to this site could likely be incurred by sites of any size.

1. INCREASED TIME ON SITE

“People leave it open all day long,” Roden said of the sidebar. “Time-on-site has seen a huge increase. It’s like when the new content comes in on the Facebook Live Feed, if you know it’s about to pop in 5 seconds you’ll stick around.”

There are a number of different factors that are making time-on-site an increasingly important metric on the web, compared to pageviews. Increased consumption of video is the best known, but as real-time streams of aggregated content become increasingly
common, increased time-on-site will be an important measurement of how successful an implementation is.

2. DECREASED SERVER COSTS

After implementing real-time infrastructure, Roden reports that “my site runs a lot more
smoothly, I’ll probably move the whole site to that technology because deep down it’s
much easier on the database for me.”

“I used to get hit by Stumbleupon and [the site] would start to crawl. Then I changed to some of this real time stuff and I’ve reduced the number of servers. Instead of the users sitting on the page and refreshing, I push it out to them. My EC2 bill has gone way down.” Roden’s experience compliments the story that Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick told us about using PubSubHubbub push feeds to deliver shared items in Google Reader to FriendFeed. Changing from polling to real-time push cut traffic between the two sites by 85%. Likewise, magazine-style feed reader Feedly says that the part of its service that now consumes PubSubHubbub from Google Reader has seen a 72% reduction in bandwidth.

…(continued) To read the rest of this sample chapter, see the PDF download. You can also check out the Table of Contents and pre-order the full report at a discounted price of $200.

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Introduction to the Real Time Web

Real time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience. No more waiting for the Pony Express to deliver a parcel cross country, no more waiting for web services to communicate from one polling instance to another. This is information being available to you at nearly the moment it’s produced, whether you’re watching for it or not.

Just this afternoon, Google declared real time search to be one of the biggest unsolved challenges it faces. This morning the NYTimes put a link to a new real time view of all its news stories on the front page of its site. Last night Facebook announced a new feature that will let users be notified instantly when their friends interact with media related to themselves on the site. This is big stuff, but what does it all mean? We offer below a collection of readings on the Real Time Web. Give these articles some time and you’ll have a solid foundation to understand, discuss and act on this emerging paradigm.

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“Instant Messaging” as The Foundation of the Future of The Web

Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication?

In January of 2008 we looked at enterprise collaboration suite Jive Software and the company’s belief that the Instant Messaging technology XMPP could serve as a foundation for the future of a real time web. In that article we explained that just like AJAX has made web pages instantly responsive to clicks, without having to request a whole new web page from the server, an IM-style web could radically speed up collaboration online. Jive pointed to a number of examples of companies using the open source real time technology XMPP, including Tivo.

See also:
The Made Who Made Gmail Says Real Time Conversation is What’s Next
Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web’s Future
Sorry Google, You Missed the Real Time Web

Experience it For Yourself

Make Google Real-Time With Twitter Search Add-on

The best way to understand the value of real time information delivery may be to experience it yourself, and one of the easiest ways to do that is with Mark Carey’s “Twitter on Google Search Results Pages” plug-in. It’s hot stuff and has honestly changed the way that all of us here at ReadWriteWeb use Google more than anything else has in a long time.

See also:
Five Sites That Let You Experience the Real Time Web Today
FriendFeed Opens the Floodgates with Real-Time Updates
TweetMeme Live: See What’s Big on Twitter Right Now – TweetMeme is one of the most innovative players in real time technology today and is a must-watch startup.
OneRiot Launches Alternative Twitter Search Engine – OneRiot just starting doing something that Google will no doubt aim to do as well, deep search into links shared across the real time web (including outside of Twitter). Twitter worked with OneRiot to enable this new product launch.
Surchur Relaunches Their “Dashboard to the Now”
Real-Time News: PubSub Gets Ready for a Comeback

Big Picture: What It All Means for Our Future

Faster – Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future

In April 2008, ReadWriteWeb guest author Alex Iskold examined why the Real Time Web is inevitable and what it means for all of us. Just another of Alex’s many mind expanding articles over the years.

See also:
Three Models of Value in the Real Time Web – Our discussion of how the real time web will be leveraged by individuals and web services.
Baynote: Does Focusing on Real-Time Behavior Trump Amazon’s Technology? – Recommendation engine Baynote believes it can move the economic needle with its real time technology.

Other Resources Off-Site

We’ve written about the real time web a lot, but these are some of our favorite resources written by other people.

Le Web ‘09 – this year’s theme is…the real time web. So watch that space.
Activity Streams Discussion Group – Though not explicitly focused on Real Time, this community movement to build a standard data format for delivering user activity streams from site to site is very related.
Mining the Thought Stream – Erick Schonfeld discusses the huge potential of sentiment tracking and topic search from real time streams like Twitter. If you enjoy that you might enjoy our post written two weeks earlier, How a Facebook Sentiment Engine Could be Huge.

Those are some of our favorite resources on this important topic. We’d love to learn about more from readers. Good luck to us all in the coming real time web!

Title photo: Listen to BREAKING ATOMS on KZSC, Creative Commons by Flickr user Heart of Oak.

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