Let’s get real, real-time should be real-time
Real-time delivery of data: you know it when you see it. You know it when you’re not seeing it.
Twitter’s streaming API is real-time. Boxcar receives your tweets within 1 second or less of you posting them. We then inject those into our own stream and 300 milliseconds later they are sent to Apple for delivery. You receive tweets in your hand roughly 6 seconds after they’ve been posted. The majority of that time is spent in Apple’s data center.
You play real-time games on your PS3 and Xbox, and you’ve done it for years now. The web is just now catching up. With games, even a second of lag is extremely noticeable. So why are some people getting away with calling real-time delivery 15 minutes or an hour?
Real-time is not 15 minutes. It’s not 5 minutes. It’s sure not 1 hour. Stop calling your stuff real-time unless you’re pushing it down pipes within a second of it happening. And you’d better be presenting it to the user within 10 seconds of the event happening.
Real-time is getting the data in the subscribers hands as fast as fucking possible. If you’re not doing that, you’re not delivering real-time data. Period.
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