In 2008, we ran the next conference under the motto “get realtime”. By hindsight, this seems a bit premature now, as the real-time web is just getting steam. Loïc Le Meur even runs his excellent LeWeb conference with “The Real-Time Web” as the theme this year – a full one and a half years later then next08.

ReadWriteWeb has just published a Primer on the real-time web in three parts (one, two and three, via), written by Ken Fromm. He is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, a recommendation, discovery, and personalisation company.

Ken’s Primer is way Twitter-centric in my opinion, but hey – Twitter is the cool kid on the blockreal-time web. What really has changed since the advent of Twitter in the mass-market, is speed.

“Years ago, pages might have been crawled by search engines daily. With the advent of RSS, new posts would flow through the system within hours. With Twitter, the flow is propagated from company to company to user in real time.”

If you are interested in the real-time web, you definitely should take some time, shut down Twitter and mail and read his piece.