Posts tagged RealTime
Entertainment Check-In App GetGlue Now Features Visual Stream, Real-Time Convo And Personalized Guides
Dec 20th
Today GetGlue, the service that lets users “check-in” to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music and even thinking about products, announced major updates for its website and iPhone app.
If you haven’t heard of GetGlue, don’t worry. Here’s how it works: After you’ve checked in to the entertainment you’re experiencing, GetGlue tells you who else is thinking about it, how many times you’ve checked-in, where it is trending on the site and how many others are currently checked into it. It connects people around entertainment, a trend that is increasingly becoming more mainstream as social TV expands. GetGlue saw an 800% increase from the beginning of the year to September.
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Users can now vote, reply and check-in right from the stream, and preview a show, movie or artist.
The conversation tab brings up friends and comments from fans that are also checked-in at the moment. Because users can keep up with conversations in real-time, this feature seems like it will become a natural part of social TV.
In this update, both GetGlue iPhone app and GetGlue.com now feature guides based on a user’s own tastes, friends’ activity and GetGlue community trends. These guides make recommendations tailored to the user’s taste graph, focusing on shows, movies and music. In the redesign, GetGlue.com will now look more like the app.
One major site feature update to note on GetGlue.com is the check-in button, which is now located in the top navigation bar.
GetGlue users feel comfortable telling their friends what they’re watching, listening to and reading whereas doing a similar thing on Facebook makes most feel uncomfortable.
Last year GetGlue partnered with entertainment companies such as HBO, Showtime, Fox and PBS, among others. Earlier this year, it hit the million user mark. In April, GetGlue received a record number of check-ins,which was right around the same time it improved its mobile app, added badges and more. And all this without instituting frictionless sharing.
GetGlue started off as a browser extension, later transforming into a semantic and social recommendation service combined with an emotionally charged space for discussion around popular shows and movies. Earlier this year, GetGlue made a shift toward location, adding geo-location sports check-ins and Foursquare integration.
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The Right Stuff: Heavy Duty Real-Time Airline Flight Tracking Tools
Dec 3rd
Seemingly every day, more real-time or near real-time data becomes accessible on the internet. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about many different types of real-time resources, but today, I’ll be focusing on real-time flight data—virtually addicting tools for frequent…
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GeoIQ Releases Real-Time Streaming Social & Device Data & Mapping API Platform
Nov 3rd
Location data provider GeoIQ today detailed a new offering called GeoIQ Social. This is a real-time streaming API that delivers location-enabled data from Twitter, Pachube-enabled sensor hardware and other platforms into a map-friendly output format that can be updated as the data changes. Boom!
Sentiment analysis, user ranking, data from sensors and potentially much more can all be taken into account in requesting data from the API. Connectors have been built for “all sorts of databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, HBase, and MongoDB as well as an even newer types of databases and APIs like Google Fusion Tables.” Awesome.
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The company concludes its discussion of the new API by saying it intends to extend far beyond where it is today in dynamic data and dynamic mapping. “Without giving it all away,” writes Chris Helm, Head of Analytics at GeoIQ, “we’re thinking along the lines of realtime analytics, dynamic event alerting and more tools for easy collaboration.”
That sounds fabulous to me. When physical place and the real-time social web come together in the form of streaming data APIs, the possibilities for augmenting time, place, civil society and the meaning of the web are substantial.
Discuss
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Sina Weibo Rolls Out Real-Time Search Engine
Nov 2nd
Sina Weibo confirmed that it has launched a real time search engine that allows people to search from a wide range of categories – posts, users, events, groups, votes, and apps.
While Baidu is the search giant in China, microblog Sina Weib…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
55% of Real-Time Entertainment is Consumed on TV, Mobile Device or Tablet
Oct 26th
Real-time entertainment traffic dominates the Web now; and over half of it happens on devices other than a PC or laptop computer. This according to a new report by research company Sandvine. The report states that "by volume, 55% of Real-Time Entertainment traffic is destined for the television (either directly to a smart TV or via an intermediary like a game console or set-top device), a mobile device or tablet." Those statistics, along with data from Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Summit presentation last week, emphasize just how far we’ve come in the post-PC era.
Of the non-computer traffic, much of it comes from Netflix (on TVs), Facebook and YouTube (both mostly on mobile devices).
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Real-Time Entertainment is defined in the report as "applications and protocols that allow “on-demand” entertainment that is consumed (viewed or heard) as it arrives." Examples given include Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and Slingbox.
Looking first at overall traffic – which includes both computers and other devices – real-time entertainment accounts for 60% of peak downstream Internet traffic in North America. There’s been a steady increase in this figure over the past few years. It was 50% in Sandvine’s March 2011 report, 42% in 2010 and just under 30% in 2009.
Netflix alone accounts for 32.7% of total peak downstream traffic in Sandvine’s latest report, a relative increase
of more than 10% since U.S. spring. YouTube accounts for 11.3% of peak traffic.
Post-PC Habits
The report notes that people are watching real-time entertainment on an increasing number of screens – including smartphones, tablets and "a TV with direct (smart TVs) or indirect (via a game console or set-top) Internet connectivity."
Interestingly, the report states that when people watch online video, "they generally choose to watch content on the largest screen available to them." So they will choose a TV over a computer, a tablet over a smartphone, and a smartphone over nothing at all.
What’s more, screen size has direct correlation to data usage:
"For example, when watching a video on a 60-inch HD capable plasma screen, most subscribers will opt for the highest video fidelity available. In that same scenario, higher- quality audio might also be provided to the home theatre system."
What’s behind the increase of consumption of real-time entertainment on devices other than computers? Sandvine claims it is mainly due to game consoles, "through
manufacturers partnering with content producers." As an example, it cites this month’s announcement by Microsoft of "a massive expansion in the list
of content providers that will be available on the Xbox 360, including
such heavyweights as Bravo, Comcast, HBO, BBC, Telefonica, Rogers
on Demand and Televisa."
Mobile Devices
Looking specifically at mobile devices (which effectively means smartphones), Sandvine reports that real-time entertainment generates 30.8% of peak demand on mobile. Web browsing is next, on 27.3%, while social networking is 20.0%. Most of the latter comes from Facebook, which represents 19.3% of peak mobile traffic. YouTube gets 18.2%.
These statistics correlate with other data that we’ve been hearing. For instance, in September Google announced that mobile devices are responsible for 10% of all YouTube downloads. Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 Summit presentation attributed 33% of Facebook traffic to mobile devices. Meeker also pointed to Pandora and Twitter, which have 60% and 55% respectively of their traffic going to mobile devices.
Slide from Mary Meeker’s 2011 report
These statistics from Sandvine, backed up by Mary Meeker’s data, clearly show that devices other than computers are not only having a big impact on consumption of real-time entertainment – they’re now the primary way to consume such content.
Let us know in the comments about your own usage patterns for consuming real-time entertainment on the Web. Are you finding that most of that is through a connected TV, mobile device or tablet?
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Real-Time Chat and Tumblr Integration Come to TV Check-in App GetGlue
Oct 25th
Social TV and entertainment check-in app GetGlue pushed out an update today that brings real-time chat, Tumblr integration and new Web widgets that let users show off their accumulated badges.
Once a user checks into a show, movie, album, video game or other form of entertainment, they can engage in a conversation with others. It prioritizes updates from one’s friends, but mixes in “interesting” comments from others and select updates from Twitter.
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Admittedly, GetGlue is slightly late to this game, but it’s a good thing they showed up. People have been chatting about TV shows and other entertainment on Twitter and Facebook for quite some time, and there’s even some early evidence that social media buzz has a correlation with high TV ratings.
It’s a logical update to GetGlue, whose functionality centers around checking into, discovering and commenting on entertainment content, be it the latest episode of “The Daily Show” or albums by popular indie rock artists. They’ve long featured the option to comment on others’ check-ins, but this update brings the conversation closer to real-time and adds a deeper integration with Twitter, where much of the chatter is already happening.
The results vary depending on what you’re watching and when. Checking into a popular show while it’s first airing is more likely to yield an immediate conversation than checking into an older episode of a show you’re watching on Hulu.
The update also includes the ability to post updates to Tumblr, just as users have long been able to update Twitter and Facebook, notifying friends and followers of recent activity.
For now, the new functionality only appears to be activated on the GetGlue website. Presumably, an update to the service’s mobile apps is on the way.
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Google+ Adds Real-Time Searching and Hashtag Support
Oct 14th
Google+ is refining its search by adding real-time results and additional support for hashtags.
The first feature, real-time search results, allows users to click either the “Most recent” or “X more recent posts” to see the current real-time …
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Plus Gets Real-Time Search & Working Hashtags
Oct 12th
In a rare appearance by engineering SVP Vic Gundotra himself, today’s Google Plus update video introduces real-time search and actual hashtag support. “We’re trying to make it easier to follow and contribute to live events on Google+, including breaking news, sporting events, and many others,” Gundotra says.
Google Plus search results now update instantly, and hashtags are now clickable, taking you to the search result for that term. Google Plus got its own search capabilities last month when the service opened to the public.
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These improvements will make search on Google Plus more timely and relevant. Google lost the advantage of real-time search on its overall search engine when its arrangement with Twitter expired this year. Now that Google has its own stream of crowd-created info, it can get back into real-time results. It has already begun to integrate Plus posts into Web search results.
Changes to Google Plus search also present an opportunity for developers. Google opened the Google Plus Search APIs earlier this month.
The timing of this release for today is notable. Apple released iOS 5 today, and it’s gunning for Google with the impending launch of its AI search assistant, Siri. Google Plus is a mobile service, too, especially powerful for Android users, and better social search on phones might help Google stave off the advances of Apple’s intelligent robot phones.
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