Chapter 14 of "Real-Time" is called "How Your Web Site Becomes a Real-Time Machine." After briefly giving a history of websites, the book notes that we are entering a new phase where they are sales in marketing machines that operate in (surprise) real-time. Websites have progressed to become more interactive with their users, to the extent that going onto a company's website is close to entering an actual store for that company.
Accordingly, for a company website to have any chance at success, it must operate within these guidelines. A big part of this is responding to potential buyers as quickly as possible, when they're still interested in buying your product or service and haven't moved on to other things. The book gives the example of the website of Bella Pictures, a wedding photography company, which flags inquiries for prompt response if both a wedding date and reception venue have been chosen. Further, a company should do its best to make sure its website stays, ideally, ahead of its competitors by analyzing data from users as quickly as is practicable.
Most of this chapter's ideas seem like no-brainers, but I suppose it is easy for companies to overlook them. It is important to keep up with new technology to make response time and all other necessary functions of a website as quick as possible, and there are definitely websites out there that have yet to deal with their users in real-time. The chapter is surprisingly brief, but that may just be because of how simple a lot of the things it puts forward are. It definitely seems to offer some useful advice, even if it doesn't have that much terribly surprising to say.
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