The Right-time Web

I just caught Kara Swisher’s post, in which she calls on all geeks to replace “real-time” Web with “right-time” Web. Right on, Kara.

Okay, so Venrock’s David Pakman should get some credit too, since Kara heard the term from him first at the Twitter Chirp conference earlier this week.  According to her post, Pakman thinks the ‘right-time’ Web is more valuable in some cases than the real-time Web:

“Real-time data is only interesting when I’m actually looking for that information. There’s no service today that’s giving information when it’s really needed. If your company is doing that…I brought my checkbook.”

Kara was a little less diplomatic about the real-time Web buzz frenzy that’s happening right now:

“One of the key issues being raised of late about making all these status update data streams helpful is that they are super-useless 98 percent of the time, resembling a raging flooded river more than a way to navigate to any place that is actually useful. Someone does have to significantly drop the signal-to-noise ratio on all this blather, cutting through to find the really valuable information we all know has to be there.”

Within the context of personalization, including crowd-sourced product recommendations and social search, “right-time” is far more meaningful than the “real-time” moniker. If I’m on the Web, I don’t want to get flooded with content just because it happens to be available in real-time. I want to get connected to the “right” information, in the instance I set my sights on it. Not seconds later.

The explosion of available content and products online has undeniably fueled this culture of immediacy. This has had profound implications for businesses, who are increasingly struggling to deliver on a new standard in customer expectations that’s all about instant gratification. As the so-called real-time Web matures, the online businesses that will prevail are going to be those that can effectively leverage this real-time culture to their benefit, meeting and exceeding customer expectations as they evolve by focusing on serving the right Web, at the right time.

We’re focused on making this a reality by enabling companies to tap into the collective intelligence of their website visitors. Although most of the real-time Web buzz continues to focus on gathering and making sense of user generated feedback captured in Twitter and Facebook, you can’t possibly observe the Web merely by looking at it or reading it. This is because the majority of what happens on the Web is never written, never rated, never reviewed. It’s told through behavior patterns in the form of online comparison shopping, bookmarking, mouse scrolls and hovers to name a few.

By mining for real-time explicit data and right-time implicit behavior patterns, companies can deliver their Website visitors a customer experience a league above the rest.