There has been tons of media attention paid to all of the companies that have entered the real time web. And, in addition to all of the new startups, companies like Google and Bing are now mixing real time results into their engines. However, what about the user? What can the user get out of the real time web? In this article, we will touch on some of the things users can do.

By guest writer Evan Britton

Fresh news on your subject of choice

The main thing users can get out of the real time web is information. You can find out what is being said right now about any particluar subject. If you want to see what people think about a sports event, movie, celebrity, or any other breaking news – a real time search will inform you.

You can head to Twitter’s homepage to perform a real time search. Twitter makes it very easy to see what is being said about a respective subject.

It is also interesting to see which links are being shared on the real time web. Sency has built an interesting real time engine which shows you both what is being said, along with today’s most popular links for a particular search term.

Hot trends

In addition to seeing popular links and what is being said, it is also interesting to see what the hot trends are this moment. Often times, real time trends can show you breaking news before major media outlets pick up the story.

What The Trend is an interesting site which shows you both the current trends as well as reasons behind why a given topic is popular right now. You can also check out this what’s going on lately page which will show you 100 popular topics that have been talked over the past few days.

Find related topics

Lastly, users can use the real time web to see topics related to a given topic. If you head over to Tweet Cloud, you can enter any keyword you’d like and see other topics that are being discussed alongside this topic. In addition, you will notice that certain words are larger font – which means that this respective keyword has been used more often along side the initial keyword that was searched for.

As more and more users take advantage of the real time web, understanding how it works and the places you can go to will surely benefit any internet surfer.

photo credit: garryknight

Evan Britton is an internet marketing veteran who recently founded Sency. The mission of Sency is to help bring the real time web to internet users so that at any time, they can find out what’s going on right now.