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The Real-Time Web: Content at the
Speed of Today's Online Publishers |
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12 January 2007 |
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News that the New York Stock Exchange may cut a deal to
bring real-time trading information to Google Finance is
bound to cause quite a stir, but the fact of the matter is
that NYSE and other sources of real-time information are
late to the Web game. While Wall Street huddled down and
focused on ensuring sub-millisecond delays in trade tickers
the rest of the world was out building news and other
business-ready content on the Web that's in real-time feeds
as soon as it's posted online. New services are sprouting
up to take advantage of this phenomenon, a trend that's
likely to shape many enterprise-ready information services. |
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The
announcement that Google is trying to strike a deal with
the New York
Stock Exchange to distribute their financial market data
via Google FInance has been generating buzz in recent
days, a move that promises to gain the attention of online
investors used to delayed NYSE market data as well as financial
portal providers (our
weblog coverage). Although the notion of getting immediate
stock trade information online is enticing, the truth of the
matter is that the Web has been a real-time medium for quite
some time. While financial institutions make their billions on
wringing the last few ounces of efficiency out of available
information services, Web users learned long ago that unique
information posted on a global network creates its own
real-time reality.
But as more primary sources of news and information post
their press releases, financial reports and stories in a
web-first mode the limitations of the Web as a real-time medium
are beginning to show some rough edges. The "feeds" that many
weblogs, wikis and Web sites create for users to subscribe to
updates to their information are not in their most technical
sense "push" sources of content. When someone using a feed
using
RSS-formatted information gets updates they're a result of
some piece of software checking in with the Web site providing
the feed to see if any updates are available. Some services
such as Weblogs.com can
be notified on a "push" basis to alert users and and services
that track RSS feeds but when it comes time to get the updates
a dog-pile of feed requests will swoop down to get the updates.
The problem gets worse on the user side also as feeds
proliferate: nobody wants to tie up processing time to get
dozens of feeds that may have only a few items of interest.
The response to this problem takes many forms, but one of
the more interesting ones is a new service from
The Real Time Matrix. Real-Time Matrix provides an
enterprise-scaled feed reading infrastructure that monitors
millions of Web feeds and onpasses updates as soon as they are
available to corporations and technology partners in
high-performance feeds based on pre-established filtering
patterns. Instead of having to hunt for relevant feeds or to
set up countless interfaces to feeds to get desired content
Real-Time Matrix provides a simple but effective system to
pre-process and filter those feeds efficiently and reliably.
Gee, sounds like...a stock ticker plant. Yes, not a new
concept by a long shot. But consider the sources: virtually
anything that has a feed on the Web. In the old days of ticker
plants the hard part was dealing with hundreds of different
feed formats and operating peculiarities. In today's Web
environment the hard part is finding relevance and structure in
a sea of standardized feeds that will be of use to a particular
audience and providing it in a reliable and robust stream. Just
as securities exchanges are beginning to open up their
real-time feeds to the public on the Web the Web itself is
discovering ways to get native Web content to be of more use to
enterprises in real-time feeds.
While Web feed aggregation is hardly new in its own right,
the idea of making Web feeds ready for real-time consumption in
enterprise environments points the way towards the increasing
importance of Web content as enterprise-ready information and
experiences that drive key executive decisions. When the world
knows about what's posted on a Web site the same time that an
enterprise does, seconds and fractions of seconds will begin to
count more and more in making sure that businesses can get
ahead of the curve in responding to those postings. In doing so
sources of information that relied on high-speed feeds to give
them a market advantage are likely to fall by the wayside even
further. Here are a few thoughts about winners and losers as
enterprise-ready real-time Web feed management comes to the
fore:
- And we need a press release wire...why? While
premium press release services provide a number of value-add
services to support organizations managing public relations
their core purpose of reaching journalists and key databases
on an exclusive basis is wearing thin very rapidly in the era
of online feeds. Ensuring real-time delivery to enterprises
of press releases from a wide variety of feed sources such as
corporate Web sites may be a pivotal blow to feed providers
increasingly challenged to prove out their worth.
- And we need traditional aggregators...why? Just as
trading room systems in financial services companies began to
spell the doom of the all-purpose market data terminal the
ability to feed Web information from any potential source on
the Web is beginning to spell out a new era in collecting
business information. As services such as
Zoominfo become more
adept at building databases of business intelligence from
mining Web sources the idea of needing to rely on database
services based on traditional feeds of information from other
traditional databases begins to look somewhat dated.
- And we need traditional news feeds...why? As
mainstream news organizations cut back on "hard news"
coverage and to focus more on value-add analysis and insight
journalism they are leaving an increasingly large vacuum for
people seeking coverage of real-time news events - a vacuum
that Web-scaled news sources seem eager to fill.
Services such as Newstex
that blend both Web-based news feeds and traditional news
feeds blend quality content in the meantime, but as the
quality of online news becomes self-validating through
services such as social bookmarking the push for a real-time
understanding of Web content as a news source will only
increase.
In a world where news is increasingly self-reporting a
real-time understanding of the Web as a global news resource
will accelerate the development of services that can collect,
package, filter and deliver an understanding of what the world
is saying and doing moment by moment. It's early days for
harvesting Web feeds as a real-time content source for
enterprise use, but the outlines of Web-sourced news' impact on
traditional real-time news sources are already beginning to
come into focus. All the world's a
ticker, it
seems.
-
John Blossom
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