Real-time Web keeps social networkers connected

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jessica Stryczek reaches for her iPhone every morning, even before she gets out of bed. It is her lifeline to the world — an uber alarm clock/CD player/e-mail device/game player/newspaper/shopping guide/banking assistant/conduit to Facebook and Twitter. "Without it, I wouldn't survive," says Stryczek, a 26-year-old teacher in Fremont, Calif.

The same goes for Sara Wilson, who starts and ends each day on her iPhones. Yes, she has two: one as an alarm clock, the other for "everything else" — e-mail, texts, Facebook updates, Twitter "tweets," checking her bank balance.

"It's always on, and glued to my body," says Wilson, a 26-year-old media buyer in San Francisco who has not had a land line since college. "It's like a security blanket."

Such is life in the post-Web 2.0 world. The latest iteration of the Internet — deemed the "real-time Web" by some analysts, is exemplified by the obsessive use of PCs or cellphones for quick interactions and dips into the online information stream. This hyper-connectedness is fueled by the rise in social media and distinguished by quick, short communication and, increasingly, an absence of privacy.

More than four in five U.S. adults online use social media at least once a month, according to a new Forrester Research report. While young people march toward almost universal adoption, the most rapid growth has occurred among consumers 35 and older. Now, established companies and start-ups are scrambling to develop real-time Web applications for gaming, intuitive online searches, location services and customer support. The market potential is huge, tech analysts and others say.

Everything from cellphones to common digital cameras is "being turned into eyes and ears for applications," says Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media who is credited with inventing the term Web 2.0. "Data is being collected, presented and acted upon in real time. It's all about immediacy and instantaneous data."

The need for data speed has inspired O'Reilly to come up with a new phrase, "Web squared," to describe the evolution of the Web as we know and use it. O'Reilly and John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, coined it in a white paper preceding their Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco next month.

They consider Wal-Mart, for instance, a Web-squared company because its operations are infused with the latest technology and driven by data from customers. One of the great Web-squared opportunities, they say, is providing that kind of real-time intelligence to smaller retailers without monolithic supply chains.