I am yet to find any use for the Real Time Web in whatever (twitter,email,facebook,rss feeds) format. As a consumer none of these actually enhance either my productivity or knowledge in anyway, they are merely there for entertainment.
Surprisingly, the only exception to that is probably FreeNode IRC , certain channels at least.
Yes, there are certain bloggers i want to read, certain discussions on HN that i want to participate in but it takes time for me to assimilate and understand what is going on, the RTW doesn't help me there.
I find twitter search useful. For example, when I was shopping for a newly released netbook, I searched the keyword on twitter for a few days, to see what people say about it and what new reviews are being released. After a few days, I was able to detect the "mood", in other words, how people feel about the product. That is very hard to achieve with just reading a professional review.
More generally, if I want to know what now is happening about something, twitter can usually deliver that.
"I searched the keyword on twitter for a few days"
There, you have used Twitter in the fashion of the "traditional" web, you just went to a RTW source thats all.
My point is i generally don't have any use for what "now" is happening, anything that is of importance generally has a longer time span and relevance to me and i don't "need" to know it straight away.
There are definitely a few streams that are very time-dependent and service way more utility near the event, rather than after the fact. Some recent examples, searching for "caltrain" after it was stopped a few weeks ago. Searching for "280 flooded" during a rain storm. Searching for "comcast near:SF" to see if anyone else was having connection problems at the moment.
We're not used to having down-to-the-second real time search yet, so it's harder to come up with use cases until we really become comfortable with these new systems. Most use cases we do see, like Trending Topics on Twitter, are discovery queries that will eventually be covered by Google's spidering, but there are whole categories worth of search cases in the long tail that won't be covered by just discovery.
I think discounting entertainment as not having value is where you're going wrong. This may be precisely where the value is for the constant update, interruptions interrupting interruptions, hyper-flow of information.
Other uses might be traffic information, black-friday sales, tornado tracking/response, stock trading, organizing and coordinating civil protest, and rapid response for brand managers.
Surprisingly, the only exception to that is probably FreeNode IRC , certain channels at least.
Yes, there are certain bloggers i want to read, certain discussions on HN that i want to participate in but it takes time for me to assimilate and understand what is going on, the RTW doesn't help me there.