Real Time Information

There are many ways in which information is presented through the world of media. Real time information is information that is delivered immediately after being collected. Real time information is most frequently used for navigation or tracking.

Many transactional online sites offer order tracking, sites like Apple, Amazon and Play.com let you log on to your account and see what part of the delivery process your ordered product is at. Domino’s Pizza offer a service which allows you to order a pizza over the internet and track which part of the cooking process it is in, it then tells you when it is being delivered, this picture shows the service:

Some people have hobbies like plane spotting, and with modern technology they can achieve their hobbies by using real time data on websites such as www.flightradar24.com, this site allows people to search for a specific flight and it refreshes the stream automatically to give the most accurate location of the plane.

                There are also sites such as www.earthcam.com that offer webcams to specific places for people to look at and maybe use for purposes such as weather. People also use these websites to look at a place of interest, maybe because they go on holiday to this place, sometimes they do this to see what the place looks like during a different time of the year, as they possibly never see it during this time.

Another example of real time data would be the notice boards at train and bus stations, they have a system where they show the train and bus number and when the train is expected to arrive. This is a good use of real time data as it allows passengers to know exactly when their train is coming. This board also would show if the train/bus has any delays or is expected to arrive early giving the passenger increased information on the train/bus.

Some transactional websites use real time data, when somebody selects a product to buy; he or she has to choose a size of the product they want, on http://shop.tottenhamhotspur.com the layout of the size choices is in a colour code system letting the customer see how many units of a particular product are a left, like this:

This is a basic method of using real time data, but still gives more information to the user, or in this case the customer, over the internet.

There are many more ways in which people use real time information including things such as the basic weather forecast, people can type into a search engine ‘weather forecast’ and it will give them a list of websites that can show them a real time forecast. On Google if you type in ‘Weather forecast’ followed by a postcode of the area, Google itself will give you a basic real time weather forecast on the search results page, this is good but very basic and doesn’t give that much information, there are other sites such as the BBC Weather’s page and the Met Office’s page that give a much clearer and detailed weather forecast of the day, they show the weather hour by hour to give a clearer outlook of the day for people to understand it much easier. The advantages of this are that it gives you a quick and clear weather forecast, but the disadvantages are that the forecast could be wrong, but then that applies for weather forecasts in general because whichever way you receive the information, it could still be wrong.

Another key feature of real time information is news feeds, news feeds are feeds that update as soon as someone posts something new up for people to view, whether it be, videos, photos or text. News feeds are also known as 'Really Simple Syndication', most commonly known as RSS. News feeds are used on the Internet for news mainly, and users are able to pick subjects that they are most interested in to feature in their own personal news feed more prominently than other subjects. An example of a popular news feed site is BBC NEWS. Advantages to news feeds are that people can find out news that they want to know all in one place, it also gives them the ability to look at only one subject of news if that is what they wish to do, so they do not have to look at the news that they may consider boring or uninteresting. The disadvantages to news feeds are that the news that is put out is read by many nearly instantly so if the sources to the news are wrong or the news is wrongly worded, there is very little time to correct the mistake before people read it so people maybe lead to the wrong message being sent out.

Social networking sites such as FACEBOOK and TWITTER have feeds, which are much like news feeds but instead of it being global news, it is news, in the case of FACEBOOK, from your friends that you are connected to through the site, or in the case of TWITTER, from celebrities and friends you are connected to through the site. All the updates, whether they are new photos, a 'status', a location, or a video, are put onto one page called the 'Homepage', recently FACEBOOK have added a feature where users can choose who they have featuring on their homepage, and also choose whom they do not want on their homepage. An advantage to this is that users have advanced options to make their time on the Internet much easier and better for them.