Last night, the Silicon Valley Software Development Forum (SDForum) Search SIG held a panel discussion on “Real-time Search” with Gerry Campbell is CEO of the soon-to-be-launched Collecta; Vik Singh, the creator and architect of Yahoo! BOSS; Akhil Wable, engineering search lead at Facebook; and Salim Ismail on behalf of Ångströ, all moderated by Robert Scoble and broadcast live on FriendFeed.

Robert moderated a great discussion that covered a lot of territory. I started off with an insight that we used heavily at PubSub, which is that Real-time search is an oxymoron. Once you take the time to store it, index it and re-present it, it's simply not Real-Time anymore. I've heard the buzzword “Right-time Search” used, which isn’t bad. The key point here is that once you’ve stored information and are “Pulling” it, the real-time aspect is lost. For true Real-Time, we need to utilize a “Push” (or publish/subscribe) approach.

The Push paradigm has been surfacing again and again for over 10 years. The original well-known effort was PointCast. Then, Rohit and Adam Rifkin tried with KnowNow. Following Bob Wyman's vision, we attempted a consumer-facing version with PubSub. None of them were able to stick. The difficulty was trying to encourage ordinary users to figure out what to subscribe to, and finding a killer consumer use-case was tough. That was before Social Networks.

The time for consumer-based Push, is now (pun intended). Your social graph is essentially a large set of latent subscriptions and with the presentation of social gestures in activity streams, the tipping point has been reached. Note that the fastest growing social networks on the web are Facebook and Twitter. Both are essentially Push systems . Facebook’s success is largely due to its activity stream and Twitter is nothing but one big activity stream. And an activity stream is just a set of subscriptions answering the request “tell me whenever my friends do something.”

Towards the end of the panel, I made the analogy (which we also used at PubSub) that the internet is evolving into a complex organism. In this new animal, Search as we know it forms the memory. If you want to know what happened last week, you need a memory. However, if you step on a nail, a memory doesn't serve you. You need a nervous system to tell you to lift your foot.

Across social networks today, activity streams, essentially subscriptions, are forming the basis of social graphs everywhere. Managing and manipulating these is going to provide an extraordinary opportunity going forward.

Now that the eggshell has been cracked, it's a great time to be in real time notification. It's really time to Push!