A Good Use of Google RT Search

I think “real time search” is meaningful in some contexts and not others: news (broadly defined) is one of several where people want the most up-to-date information. However I’m ambivalent about how Google has so far implemented RT search on its SERP (in the middle of the page):

But here’s a nice use of it: Tweets from the LeWeb event — as a news ticker:

However, is the above better than “watching” on Twitter itself or a Twitter client? No.

In the local context user-generated content is more important than “real-time” content. The two are overlapping because most of the people creating the RT content are users.

On a mobile device I may be interested in communicating in real time with people who are out and about or determining the “hot spots” and things to do in real time (e.g., Citysense), but the use cases are not that broad in my view. While I might want to know where my friends are “right now” I don’t need to see Tweets that just happened about the restaurant I’m about to go to. 

We can lump product inventory into the RT category — and that’s meaningful of course in a local context.

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Tags: Real time content