The Jason Salas Experience

Typically with any new technology platform, bark outweighs bite.  So often a new shift in thinking gets the online community so jazzed just based on raw potential, everyone buzzes about how cool, efficient and profitable the new paradigm could be.  All we need is a sound case study to reinforce our suspicions and support our theories.

It's apropos that I used the holiday break to track the emergence of Real-Time Web applications.  The relevance came in the form of me being able to track the pulse of "Christmas" as a searchable topic, seeing as how that specific keyword involved a scheduled event of global importance, and had enough intro/outro traffic for a couple of days before and after the actual holiday that it made the pace of updates in services like Collecta and Google reflecting real-time publishing incredibly entertaining to watch.  (Not to mention the breakneck pace of posts on the holiday itself.)

There were literally hundreds of thousands of tweets, Flickr images, news stories and open microblogging platform updates all having to do with the events surrounding December 25 all over the planet.  

The real-time search services performed beautifully, living up to their hype, facility to mammoth amount of work and delivering a user experience that carried high entertainment value, if not some sort of usefulness.  That's significant, because Christmas is naturally something we collectively knew about and could predict.

But that was only half of the equation.  Given its annual nature, everyone saw Christmas coming and mentally prepared to post all sorts of media to the Internet ad infinitum.  What we now need as the second half of the litmus test is for real-time search services to properly handle a major breaking story.

Twitter gained international credibility (and notoriety), by allowing its users to interact with the events unfolding in regards to the plane crash in the Hudson River, with the political strife in Iran, and with the untimely passing of Michael Jackson. If the new generation of real-time search tools can effectively harvest and report coverage of a news event of similar magnitude, with the publishing load imposed by the worldwide social networking community at an unprecedented scale, we'll have completed the cycle.  I believe they will.

And thus, will have achieved our case study.