Why do people care how Twitter will make money? “We won’t know where we, the users, fit in — until they tell us how they’re going to make money,” Dave Winer wrote a year ago this week, “And when they tell us, we may not like it.” That’s one reason why people care how Twitter makes money.

Whether you’re a person concerned that the popular social network you’re investing your time and energy in might monetize in an anti-social way, or you’re a skeptic who refuses to believe that the world-changing potential of Twitter is real until it proves itself economically viable – you probably heard that Twitter announced tonight it’s got a plan for advertisements. You can breathe a sigh of relief; the plan is downright boring, just as it should be.

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Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others. It’s unclear who will use it, Tweetie got bought by Twitter last week and Twitterific has its own ads, but other apps will come and go, hopefully given the option (not the requirement) to show Twitter ads to their users.

Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received.

This is great: it’s relatively non-invasive, nothing too crazy, nothing terribly exploitive. Some people who insist on reading every Tweet in their stream will probably be annoyed once they find ads in it, but there are already lots of unofficial ads being published on Twitter and maybe this will break those people of the habit of obsessing over every little message.

This is surely not the intention behind the plan, Twitter HQ itself is full of people who spend time carefully pruning their streams. Twitter’s new head of PR Sean Garrett, for example, quit following NBC’s @newmediajim and media analyst Shelly Palmer last week, something it’s hard to imagine him doing for any reason other than concern about signal-to-noise ratio and an unhealthy concern with reading every one of the Tweets in his stream.

But the point is this: it appears that no baby animals will be hurt in the making of the Twitter.

Along with the big search deals with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and the forthcoming availability of power Commercial Accounts, Twitter seems to have found relatively non-violent ways to monetize. As long as the firehose of user activity data is in fact made more widely available and not kept from small innovators, and as long as regular accounts aren’t handicapped in order to make commercial accounts more appealing – then these three plans together look pretty good.

It’s not banner ads, it’s not sales of data to direct marketers, it’s not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care?

It’s entirely predictable, shouldn’t hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: “The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)”

Update: Twitter’s Biz Stone posted to the company’s blog about this at one minute after midnight. He didn’t say much that was new but he did title the post “Hello World,” implying that this is in some ways the real beginning for Twitter.

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“Recommended.”
-HP Official News

“Very thorough. Exceeded my expectations. Nice work.”
-Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI

“The report is excellent — a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn’t and what the industry needs in order to press forward.”
- John Borthwick
CEO, Betaworks

Those are just a few of the things that people have said about our newly released research report The Real-Time Web and its Future so far. Want to know what’s included in the report? Check out the Table of Contents and the full text of the Introduction below.

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That’s the Table of Contents and below is the full text of the introduction to the report. We hope you’ll purchase this report via this link – and check out our package deals for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management as well!

What is The Real-Time Web? Beyond Twitter and Facebook

Dave Winer defines the real-time Web in four words: “It Happens Without Waiting.”1 That’s true, and appropriately vague. The phrase “real-time Web” means different things for different people and it’s too early in the game to have anything but a loose, inclusive definition.

Many of the different forms the real-time Web takes do have some common benefits, user experience elements, lessons learned, pitfalls and possibilities. This is what we explore in this report.

It’s definitely a whole lot more than just Twitter and Facebook, though these are the best known instances of what’s referred to as the real-time Web. Someday Facebook may open up its user data and play a larger role in the real-time Web than just the introduction to the stream model that it plays today. Someday Twitter may grow, discover how to retain users and effectively encourage more than the small number of people who today create the vast majority of content on that service. Today engineers estimate that Twitter sees about 1 thousand messages published per second and between 5 and 10 million links shared per day, before de-duplication. That sounds like a lot, but the real-time Web as a whole is already much, much larger than Twitter.

For infrastructure provider Kaazing, the real-time Web is using HTML5 Web Sockets technology to push live financial information to the Web browsers of banking customers that had always been limited to desktop applications for security reasons.

For consumer web app Pip.io, the real-time Web is creating an XMPP-powered chat-like experience for users to communicate with friends around objects like a Google Map or a streaming Netflix video playing in the Pip.io web OS.

For semantic recommendation company Evri, the real-time Web is the ebbing and flowing of traffic data on Wikipedia. That data points to hot topics that Evri needs to build topic pages to serve their publisher customers.

For search engine OneRiot, the real-time Web is made up of the links people share on Twitter …as well as Digg, Delicious and the click-streams of more than a million users who have opted-in to exposing what they see online through the OneRiot toolbar.

For Q&A service Aardvark, the real-time Web is the people inside the social circle of a user who happens to be available online at a given moment and interested in the topic of a user’s question.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that now deliver updated content to any other application that subscribes to a PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud feed, immediately after that content is published. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says the real-time Web creates a sense of flow for users that’s comparable to the way television holds our attention.

Google’s Brett Slatkin, developer of the PubSubHubbub real-time protocol, says the real-time Web is a foundation for efficient computing and use cases we can’t yet even imagine.

In writing this report we interviewed 50 people who work on technologies that power or leverage what they consider to be the real-time Web. Those people have had a very diverse array of experiences, but articulate a common story. It’s a story of increased computational efficiency – and software that struggles to keep users from feeling overwhelmed. It’s a story of radically new possibilities but strategies based on adding value in conjunction with more traditional, slower moving online resources.

We hope you enjoy reading this overview of the emerging real-time Web. We believe this phenomenon is one that will play a major role in the Web and world of the future.

The page-based model of destination sites, created by centralized expertise and navigated through authority-based search and clicking link by link is being transcended. We think this survey of current strategies and experiences to date will prove very useful in helping you effectively participate in and help build the future of the real-time Web.

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It’s November 2009 and we’re nearing the end of a decade. It’s been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.

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The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web), however it didn’t reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade.

Blogging

Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world.

Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary – Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com, launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing.

Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis.

By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers – proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years.

RSS

Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS, created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media.

Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications.

Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website – whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog – not to use RSS.

Twitter & The Real-Time Web

The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web.

To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media – but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they’re a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Media in the Next Decade

There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it’s true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I’m a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times – these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs.

The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days – news or otherwise.

However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry. Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don’t will fade away.

See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music

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Last month, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams stated that he “desperately” wanted to retire the company’s suggested user list – the list of Twitter accounts shown to new users of the service to help them find interesting people to follow. At the time, he hinted that it might evolve into something more “Twittery and democratic.” But now, what was a “maybe” before has turned into a “definitely.” Speaking at a conference in Malaysia, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters that the suggested users list will be “going away” and “in its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.”

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According to an AP article released today, Stone explained that the new suggested users list would be more tailored to the users’ interests, but he did not say how exactly the company would accomplish this task. He also would not confirm when the current list would be removed or replaced.

The Suggested Users List, commonly abbreviated “SUL,” has long been a source of controversy for the company. Meant to offer a helpful introduction to Twitter novices about what sort of interesting people, companies, and services can be found on Twitter, the list has angered many who felt it was a way Twitter could show favoritism towards some accounts while ignoring others potentially more worthy of inclusion.

Noted tech legend Dave Winer argued that Twitter was taking an editorial interest in their service, and one that rapidly inflated the follower counts of those blessed with Twitter’s “gift.” Meanwhile, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis offered the company half a million dollars for three years on the list. (Twitter didn’t take him up on the offer.)

The benefits to getting on the list are great indeed. Users added to the SUL, gained on average of 53,000 new followers after being on the list for a week and 170,000 within the first month. Some users even gained as many as 370,000 in the first 30 days.

For a service favored by marketers, businesses, and other self-promoters, placement on the SUL was a surefire ticket to Twitter stardom. New followers meant more traffic to the websites linked in the Twitter updates and more traffic meant more money could be made through on-site advertising. It was almost as if Twitter itself was writing you a check.

Thankfully, in this case, Twitter has listened to their community and is planning on a more egalitarian system. The only question now is how will they know which accounts to suggest? Of course, there is still the old stand-by method of importing your email address book to suggest users you already know who are on the service. But what Twitter plans on offering sounds a little more robust. Perhaps they will introduce an algorithm that takes into account a Twitter user’s “authority?”

If that’s the case, Twitter may be jumping out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. This is because there isn’t solid agreement as to how “authority” should be calculated. Late last year, Twitter app Seesmic creator’s Loic Le Meur started a heated back-and-forth on the matter when he wrote a blog post which said that Twitter should rank search results by the number of followers you have. More followers meant more authority, he said. Social media guru and blogger Robert Scoble quickly countered saying that the number of people you follow was actually a more important number as is the number of retweets, the number of favorited tweets, the number of inbound links to a tweet and the number of clickthroughs on an item in Twitter search. Soon, the entire tech blogosphere was engaged in the discussion with seemingly every blog weighing in with their opinion.

And this was only a casual discussion among Twitter users based on one person’s suggestion. Imagine what an official policy change by Twitter will lead to! Clearly, no matter what the company comes up with, it’s bound to be heavily debated and discussed. In any event, it will definitely be worth the wait to find out what that is.

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The next version of popular web dashboard service Netvibes will push “near real-time” updates from feeds to the browser, a dramatic change in how the service works. Those feeds will be served up along with the standard suite of functional widgets the company has always provided.

As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.

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In an unembargoed presentation sent to press this morning, Netvibes said that it would be adding support to its next version for both Pubsubhubbub and RSS Cloud protocols. When those technologies are used to tell Netvibes that new items are available, the items will be pushed automatically to the browsers of subscribers – with no browser refresh required.

Code named Wasabi, the version will go into private beta later this week and will launch to the public at December’s Le Web conference in Paris, where the theme of the event is the real-time web.

Support for real-time feeds has so far been much stronger on the publisher side than the consumer technology side. With blog publishing services WordPress, Blogger and Typepad all adding Pubsubhubbub or RSSCloud feeds to their offerings, there are now hundreds of millions of real-time feeds available in those two formats. So far only a few small feed readers have begun consuming these feeds; RSSCloud developer Dave Winer’s own River2, a complex but customizable desktop feed reader, and LazyFeed, a simple but enjoyable feed-powered discovery engine, have turned on full support for real-time feeds. Real time didn’t come up in interviews this week with the creators of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Google Reader implemented very limited support for PubSubHubbub in August, just pushing a Hubbub feed of “shared items” from Reader to the now-Facebook owned FriendFeed. In that case Google Reader was playing the part of the publisher and FriendFeed was the reader. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has told us that when PubSubHubbub support allowed FriendFeed to wait for updates from Reader, instead of polling regularly to check for updates, traffic between the two services was cut by 85%.

From decreased server costs to an improved experience for users to increased time-on-site, the benefits of real-time feeds can be many. Can Netvibes pull off integration of real-time feeds into its existing dashboard product? Some developers experimenting with these new real-time feeds elsewhere have reported stumbling blocks in the process, and Netvibes hasn’t had a perfect record of service for users in all locations around the world, either. Long caching of feeds has been an issue for Netvibes, though, and this update will cut down substantially on the delays that users see after feeds of interest have published new content.

Invitations to the private beta will roll out later this week, giving a few hundred users an opportunity to see the new Netvibes for themselves.

Discuss

URL shorteners sprang into sudden essentialness with the advent of microblogging, and especially with the advent of Twitter. Until yesterday, TinyURL was the shortener of choice, boosted by Twitter’s default shortener setting.

Twitter’s sudden switch to competing URL shortener Bit.ly not only was a surprise to many, but the move could spell an unforeseen and swift death for TinyURL. So what gives? What makes one URL shortener different from another?

The most persuasive answer (there are others, and we’ll get to them) is metrics. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly is also a trend management and metrics platform, one that is very useful not only for tracking shortened links, but also for gleaning information about current trends and memes. In short, forgive the pun, Bit.ly enables better real-time search and meme tracking, two things valuable to both users and marketers.

Twitter’s announcement that Twitter Search will be crawling links in tweets and indexing content from those pages, then, is not an incident isolated from the switch to Bit.ly. Bit.ly may just enable Twitter to finally monetize itself.

There was an early signal for this turn of events and it was Google who sent it. When Google News made its appearance on Twitter by setting up an official account, Bit.ly was the search company’s URL shortener of choice. Google’s love and need for data make it easy to see why. At the same time, Google’s use was an implicit endorsement, and maybe and indication that Google had a keen interest gleaning what data it could for its own purposes.

And then of course are all the convenient entangling alliances. The same investors backing Summize, which became Twitter Search, also back Bit.ly, and were early investors in Twitter itself. Add a pinch of the fact Twitter was founded by ex-Googlers and a dash of RSS-creator Dave Winer’s involvement with the creation of Bit.ly and you have a stew with the distinct aroma of good ole boy handshakes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and it’s a partnership that makes for some excellent new, perhaps incredibly monetizable, potential. It will be interesting to see what happens to incumbent champion TinyURL (and the others) now that the geek powers that be have backed a different horse. At least through April, TinyURL shortened 66 percent of all shortened links, compared to Bit.ly’s 12 percent and ow.ly’s 11 percent. 

URL shorteners sprang into sudden essentialness with the advent of microblogging, and especially with the advent of Twitter. Until yesterday, TinyURL was the shortener of choice, boosted by Twitter’s default shortener setting.

Twitter’s sudden switch to competing URL shortener Bit.ly not only was a surprise to many, but the move could spell an unforeseen and swift death for TinyURL. So what gives? What makes one URL shortener different from another?

The most persuasive answer (there are others, and we’ll get to them) is metrics. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly is also a trend management and metrics platform, one that is very useful not only for tracking shortened links, but also for gleaning information about current trends and memes. In short, forgive the pun, Bit.ly enables better real-time search and meme tracking, two things valuable to both users and marketers.

Twitter’s announcement that Twitter Search will be crawling links in tweets and indexing content from those pages, then, is not an incident isolated from the switch to Bit.ly. Bit.ly may just enable Twitter to finally monetize itself.

There was an early signal for this turn of events and it was Google who sent it. When Google News made its appearance on Twitter by setting up an official account, Bit.ly was the search company’s URL shortener of choice. Google’s love and need for data make it easy to see why. At the same time, Google’s use was an implicit endorsement, and maybe and indication that Google had a keen interest gleaning what data it could for its own purposes.

And then of course are all the convenient entangling alliances. The same investors backing Summize, which became Twitter Search, also back Bit.ly, and were early investors in Twitter itself. Add a pinch of the fact Twitter was founded by ex-Googlers and a dash of RSS-creator Dave Winer’s involvement with the creation of Bit.ly and you have a stew with the distinct aroma of good ole boy handshakes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and it’s a partnership that makes for some excellent new, perhaps incredibly monetizable, potential. It will be interesting to see what happens to incumbent champion TinyURL (and the others) now that the geek powers that be have backed a different horse. At least through April, TinyURL shortened 66 percent of all shortened links, compared to Bit.ly’s 12 percent and ow.ly’s 11 percent.