GigaOM » Collaboration

The Real-time Enterprise

Simon Mackie — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:58:54 +0000

The corporate social-networking and microblogging scene is evolving at a staggering rate, spurred on by the massive growth in consumer-oriented tools like Facebook and Twitter. Here at WebWorkerDaily we’ve covered many of the apps in this space, like Socialtext, present.ly and Yammer, but if you want to truly grasp the huge breadth of tools now available and how companies are taking advantage of them and integrating them into their businesses, check out the new in-depth report by Sameer Patel on GigaOM Pro, “The Real-Time Enterprise” (subscription required). Patel looks at the history of real-time tools in the enterprise and how they have developed over time, why these tools enable businesses to foster collaboration and sharing, and how real-time employee-to-employee conversations have a positive impact on business performance.

The report contains a comprehensive look at the current players in the market and likely developments in the near future, covering tools from smaller SaaS startups like Yammer, Xobni and Socialtext to the larger, more established enterprise vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM. Patel concludes with some solid recommendations for businesses implementing real-time tools. If you’re looking to incorporate real-time tools into your business, this 21-page report is well worth checking out.

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The New Lazyfeed Adds Real-time Updates to Your News Feeds

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:00:07 +0000

Lazyfeed has relaunched itself with an emphasis on making things even easier for you and, thus, making you even lazier (to use its own terminology). Topic-based readers (a subject we’ve written about before) have become popular of late, but Lazyfeed appears to be gaining the most attention. This latest update improves its real-time results.

The biggest change brings a dynamic real-time look and feel to the experience as your topics automatically update themselves. (You no longer need to click them.) That might not seem like a big deal, but if you track many different topics that adds up to a lot of clicks over the course of time.

The question will be whether or not you like this busier activity. When Friendfeed added its real-time updates feature earlier this year, many of its users complained about it being too active. The answer was a simple pause button option that allowed you to freeze all updates until you felt all caught up. I think Lazyfeed will need to add the same pause button feature.

Personally, I love it. I think the sooner we get the news and information, the better. I think services such as Lazyfeed and guzzle.it are on the right track. They are ushering in a new era in news readers. We’re no longer restricted to just the RSS feeds that we’ve manually subscribed to or even who we follow on Twitter — by simply adding the topics we’re interested in tracking, we’re able to keep on top of the latest news in real time.

Do you like the new Lazyfeed update? Is it too busy for you?

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Google Gets True Real-time Search

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:44:37 +0000

It was foretold, and lo, it has come to pass: Google has implemented real-time search, built right into its existing search results framework. What does that mean?

It means you get instant access to stuff that’s happening as it happens, including up-to-the-minute results from Yahoo! Answers, news and blog posts, and Twitter content. Real-time results are accessible on mobile platforms like the iPhone and Android devices, too, making it even more useful.

Google made an official announcement regarding the service today, posting images of and detailing the new real-time results, but it has yet to implement the new features in all areas. I couldn’t access the real-time searching, for instance, though other recent improvements like the super-clean redesigned home page were active.

The results don’t overrule or occlude the more established type of content you’re used to seeing in Google searches. Instead, they sit alongside sites which contain general information and context related to your query. Judging by the screenshots and preview videos, it’s an elegant marriage of the two types of information, and, best of all, you don’t have to go to a separate site or do any kind of special settings changes to enable the new real-time searching.

If you do want to focus your search on only the most current information, however, you can select “Latest” from the search options menu to view an entire page full of tweets, new blog posts, and fresh news content related to the topic you’re searching. Finally, you can check out “hot topics” on Google Trends to see a list akin to the trending topics on Twitter, except covering all the types of publications instead.

This development has huge implications for web workers. Web research can now speak to the immediate present as well as information that’s had time to percolate. Obviously, that has both good and bad sides. On the one hand, you can better handle major industry shifts as a subject-matter expert, and impress clients with your currency. On the other, people will have to be much more dependent on their own common sense, since real-time information is much more vulnerable to the dissemination of falsehoods, intentional or otherwise.

Check out the following video for more about the new addition to Google’s arsenal:

Let us know when Google gets updated in your area as real-time search rolls out worldwide.

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Google Gets Real-time Search

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:00:23 +0000

Twitter, you’re not the only one with up-to-the-second search results. Google now boasts that ability, too, a fact revealed in an Omgili blog post. It isn’t yet a publicly-available feature, but with very little effort on your part, you too can narrow your results to “this past second,” or a range of other different increments.

The trick is in using Google’s “Search Options,” a new feature added in May of this year that allows you to filter your results a number of ways, including according to how recently something was published. The closest you can get to real-time results using the official Google menu options is “Past 24 hours,” which is handy, but if currency is central to how well you do your job, getting even closer is ideal. Here’s how to do it.

To narrow your results further still, you’ll have to do some manual editing of the results URL you get from conducting a time-specific Google search. Simply conduct a search for the term of your choice and narrow it using the “Past 24 hours” filter. For the sake of this walkthrough, I used “Beatles 2009 Remaster” as my search term. This is what your URL should look like:

http://www.google.com/#q=Beatles%202009%20Remaster&hl=en&safe=off&sa=G&output=search&tbs=qdr:d&tbo=1&fp=b89dc01650a86922

The “qdr:d” portion of this URL specifies the date range for your search. Changing the “:d” part of this formula will change the time frame of your search query. If you replace it with an “n”, so that it looks like “qdr:n,” you get results in the past minute. “qdr:s” returns results posted within the last second.

You can also specify a time frame by putting a number after the “qdr:n,” like so:

http://www.google.com/#q=Beatles%202009%20Remaster&hl=en&safe=off&sa=G&output=search&tbs=qdr:n15&tbo=1&fp=b89dc01650a86922

Which produces these results, published in the last 15 minutes:

You may not need this degree of granularity in your Google search results, but if the nature of your business depends on staying as up-to-date as possible, as it does in my field, then searching Google in real-time is a significant boon.

Share your favorite Google URL hacks in the comments.

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