Not everything is asynchronous. Collaborative writing and chat for example require a real-time infrastructure. And Google Wave shows that a whole new class of real-time collaborative applications will soon be unleashed upon users – a bunch of medical specialists contributing to a diagnostic process, or a bunch of IT engineers poring over an obscure bug on a production system are both examples where real-time collaboration is the difference between sharing contributions back-and-forth and actually engaging in a conversation.

Real-time on the social web is not chiefly about time critical information – it is much more closely related to people swarming over a subject. In the traditional western office, people exchange memos – but when a problem occurs they gather where they find each other and start chatting. That is the real-time web. It is only the tip of a continuum of collaborative tools that cover the whole spectrum of social distances between users.

If you wouldn’t have, then maybe it should be in your feed reader My thinking is that there is something bigger that we have not figured out yet.

Also there is demand in the Enterprise software space for real-time delivery of all sorts of information. This is the kind of application which would have been developed using the Teknekron/TIBCO Information Bus (or similar middleware) ten years ago. Now, it would now benefit from real-time web technologies. It won’t be for people to chat about cilantro versus bacon (like friendfeed), it would focus on market news / inventory levels / sales trends / etc. Anything where the data is timely, but where a human stays in the loop to decide what to do about it.