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To get value out of the real-time web, thinks stock tips rather than Starbucks

The Real-Time Web is fairly frothy right now, with numerous startups either feeding the Twitter beast or extending the status update idea, witness the Facebook redesign, FriendFeed or the buzzy event-focused HotPotato. This is going to be an ever bigger story that needs to be better understood - Gartner points out that most firms lack a real time web strategy.

The rtw is more of a New York story than most web memes. Normally laggards on the Interwebs compared to our West Coast  cousins, its emergence has finally given the Big Apple's speed-crazed denizens something they can get their teeth into. New Yorkers love instant; they turn email into instant messaging, and they (we) think people care about what we're doing every minute of the day. Perfect.

Leading the charge for the East Coast team are two exceptionally well positioned firms  Betaworks (Bit.ly, Twitter, Tumblr, Tweetdeck...) and Union Square Ventures (Twitter, Tumblr, Outside.in, FourSquare...). Twitter singlehandedly created and now dominates this space. But in recent months I think it's headed off in a direction that takes us away from where the value will be. It started off with a simple question that was context (What are you doing?), but has since shifted to content, as celebrities have joined the bandwagon. Anything a celebrity says, even if a dull 3-word "I'm at Starbucks" update, is content. This has resulted in most people seeing the real-time web as nothing but a tidal wave of fairly low quality drivel, with no relevance to anyone but OCDs and stalkers.

But this misses the point. Twitter's original mission was bang on - context, not content is king, and this seems to me to be the real source of value likely to emerge from the real-time web. 140 characters is not enough for a novel, but it is enough to signal information that can be used elsewhere.

Blackberry-toting financial analysts, the meat and potatoes of this city, have an insatiable appetite for speed, and live their life in a blur of real-time data-driven decision making. These stand to be big winners here. One example I heard from ThomsonReuters recently - if a number of geo-tagged Tweets talk of a fire, powercuts or a bomb going off somewhere, it won't take much to connect that to the local businesses, and short the stock of companies relying on them as suppliers.

This is really a semantic web story, and one that needs machine readable structured data. The obvious ones that come to mind are location, direction, keywords, links and communication history. And the source of much of this - overlooked in most discussions and startups so far - is the mobile.

People designing tomorrow's real-time web plays should keep in mind the highest business value for the output of their services may not be celebrity-spotters looking for trivia, but analysts looking for semantically readable, mobile-sourced data to help inform and speed up business decisions.

So, good times ahead for those who can figure out how to connect the real-time web with the mobile - and not just at the creamy, mocha-flavored superficial level.