[Originally posted in Venture, January 2009]

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, he almost gave the Internet a heart attack.

Twitter was abuzz before news outlets had time to scratch their heads, with thousands of new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson. Facebook feeds were littered with eulogies about the King of Pop, sans links. Wikipedia was brought to a halt by the number of contributors posting conflicting reports of his condition. Google, on the other hand, mistook the sudden interest in MJ as a malicious attack, and went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTACHAs and malware alerts. Similarly, Yahoo and other search engines had no idea what hit them, showing results for ‘top beer expert Michael Jackson’ who died in 2007.

Has the world gone crazy again?

The “old” Internet giants such as Yahoo and Google certainly did go crazy. With their reactions to Michael’s death arriving hours too late, the hungry audience flocked to the instantaneous new Internet, aptly named the “Real-Time Web”, to get a live timeline of the event. Suddenly, the Internet was not about carefully crafted algorithms and page rankings, it was about what individuals deemed as “important”.

Naturally, search engines have no intention of falling behind. A few months after the Michael Jackson incident, Microsoft and Google signed deals with Twitter to put its content into their search indexes, almost as soon as it shows up on Twitter. Their move has not only empowered the Real-Time Web even further, it has also raised the question as to whether this new trend is the new million-dollar opportunity.

It’s no wonder then, with such reactions, that Internet pundits and investors are already drooling over the creation, architecting, and curation of this new, turbo Web, the long-awaited child of Web 2.0. While Web 2.0 worked with the power of sharing pictures, videos, and information, the Real-Time Web is about sharing this information in real-time for immediate awareness, collaboration and contribution.

Businesses could gain a lot by being on the leading edge of this movement. Winning customer loyalty with real-time corporate communication is an easy win. The Real-Time Web facilitates engagement in ways that were not available two years ago, and companies are already using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to “be themselves”.

A few weeks ago, IKEA was one of the first companies to go all-out with Real-Time Web marketing. They created a Facebook profile for the store manager of a new branch in Sweden. Over a two-week period, images of IKEA showrooms were uploaded to his Facebook photoalbum, and then IKEA put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in any picture will win it. With the way tagging works on Facebook, the moment the users tagged anything, everyone in their network instantly knew that there was something up for grabs. Subsequently, thousands and thousands of people flooded to the IKEA Facebook page in search of freebies. The photo tagging campaign took off like wildfire, becoming one of the most popular stories around the Web. With that, IKEA had another million potential customers looking at images of their catalogs.

Yet, improved communication is almost elementary when compared to the potential of the Real-Time Web in other fields. It is already playing a major role in collaboration, with Google Wave testifying to that. As the world becomes more globalized, businesses are finding it more important to work more efficiently with their Indian IT-solution providers, East Asian suppliers, or Saudi Arabian clients. The Real-Time Web will soon be playing a huge role in real-time pricing and inventory management, which the advent of can give retailers the possibility of efficient price equilibrium adjustments. Mobile ad networks, with time and location-based advertising, are also in a great position to capitalize on real-time ad opportunities.

It’s time to fasten your seatbelt, the Web is about to evolve again. Now.

More Hyperlink articles:
It’s Time to Learn How to Surf
It’s Real Time
“Start a Blog” is Not a Social Media Strategy