I was recently reading a blog on trendwatching.com titled “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010” and I utterly agree that Real-Time Reviews will be crucial not only next year, but will change how we approach reviews for many years to come. However, I also think the examples presented are still some what limited. We have to stop thinking that everything that is real-time is somehow connected to Twitter. There can be a real-time world outside of Twitter nor does just pulling in Twitter Feeds make you real-time or even useful.

The word real-time it self has been very forgiving in many respects because we have accepted many things as real-time well before they were really real-time. When I think of real-time, I think of something happening instantly, ie, as someone types in a comment, I’m seeing every key stroke as it happens. The closest to this we have seen so far is Google Wave. Yet service like Twitter, truly aren’t even close to being that fast in presenting data and that might be for very good reason. If you could imagine a world of constant real-time, you would quickly come to realize that would be too information to make any sense of. The truth is that people don’t really wan’t real-time raw data. They want real-time trends. People want statistically relevant information at a moment notice. I think a great example of this would be the CNN coverage of the Iranian election. New anchor Don Lemon would often refer to CNN’s twitter and implore viewers to tweet how they felt about the elections. Lemon would read them off one by one, “Dingle35 says the movement is strong, Abrago says Come show your support of green movement in L.A. today, JKowowski says the iranian government are arresting american reporters, JakeJake says this isn’t an American concern, we should leave it alone” As you can see it just a bunch of individual opinions and even if they were more coherent and organized they wouldn’t necessarily reflect some larger public opinion. Statistical relevancy would require a system that could organize and interpret how the opinions are categorized.

Trendwatching gave an example of EezeeRator which is a free travel companion from French Air Valid that allows passengers to post airline reviews while in flight. While this type of ethnography is important in getting very detailed information about a particular flight, it doesn’t necessarily represent the average of flight experiences. What prospecting consumers really want is a way to interpret all the opinions and then present that data in a meaningful and relevant way. What was the most common concern, what was the most common praise? Did the pros out number the cons? I think the best analogy would be counting your profits by the pennies. If Twitter were an accounting system tweets would be every transaction. How useful would a running ticker of every purchase be to a store owner? One dollar here, two dollars there, one, three, two, five and so on. It might be useful for getting a “feeling” for how things are going, up or down but even that is never for certain especially depending on the scope of all sales. It might be up for the last few minutes but down over the last hours, yet still up in terms of the entire day, or year. Counting every transaction can’t give you this view. What the owner wants is Real-Time Trends. How is the trend of sales moving in comparison to particular time frames.

In conclusion, real-time reviews are going to be big but we need to change our preconceptions of what real-time reviews are. Tweets about products are reviews and they are real-time but they aren’t necessarily useful. Truly useful real-time reviews will have to be able to consolidate all these tweets or real-time opinons into some form of statistically relevant data set that represent a trend.