After spending a weekend with a bunch of Geeks on a Plane, I have come to love the idea of Real Time internet. (Click here for a little background into my experience with Real Time HTTP Connections) The real time web opens up possibilities to instant access content and continuous updates to that content. This is a difficult concept to grasp and I understand there is a lot of negative potential there. The real time web is sort of looked down upon. Lets face it, the first thing that pops into your head is SPAM!
Of course, spammers are going to love the Real Time web. They will use it and abuse it just like they have with all the other social media platforms out there. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel and like all previous web revolutions the potential is limitless.
I’m a sucker for cutting edge controversial technologies… which would explain the use of Flash for the nGn platform. Innovation is what makes web development fun. So why not connect the two? I see the Real Time web as a gateway to instant flash websites. Similar to streaming, we use the realtime web to constantly update a flash website. Content is pushed while content is being seen. The Flash movies are broken into small parts and we run a load sequence ( talked about in my last post here ) to load the parts on the fly. The only difference with Real Time is that the end user never sees a loading bar. Bottom up or Top Down loads similar to HTML can be achieved in this fashion. The reason it isn’t done now is because of the absense of a low latency persistent connection. Having to implement a Comet server just to get a website up and running is a lot of overhead. Not to mention all the experimentation and code that would be required to implement such a website.
I think we’re up for it. 
