| I just finished reading Sarah Perez's Where Does Real-Time Matter? In Viewing the Stream or Searching It? (Facebook Bets on the Latter) on Read Write Web. Setting aside the debate over the "real-time" terminology, to me the article offers a false dichotomy. Yes, "real-time" matters, and it matters in many different use cases, including viewing and searching.  Fast flowing information streams—whether the result of search, friend timelines, whatever—are like drinking from a fire hose. These must rely on some type of filtering to provide the lens through which the raw streaming information is consumed.
This is nothing new. The radio spectrum is teeming with information streams that we are incapable of consuming en mass. So are your eyes, for that matter. We use radios to tune into specific "channels" of information to provide a lens on the radio spectrum. Our brain and nervous system uses clever image processing tricks to provide a lens on the visible light hitting our eyes. We will continue to evolve (develop) a variety of lenses through which to view digital information streams from Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. Facebook search, Twitter search, TweetDeck groups, are just three examples of specific lenses. It's not a question of where real-time matters. It matters everywhere. It's more a question of which lenses are best suited for different objectives. | 
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