@follow has gone from concept to market - at least in alpha/beta form - in less than 8 weeks.

As Tom has pointed out, it became obvious to us that the desire to follow ‘the conversation’ threads across multiple networks - news, social and otherwise was not just something that we wanted.  However, after we committed to building @follow and the initial ‘irrational exuberance’ period had passed and we started some hard thinking and design work, we realized that one of the reasons we had not come across another service like @follow were the dual problems of scale and cost, particularly when you start throwing around the term ‘real time’.

@follow faces quite a few challenges with scaling the service in order to live up to our original goal, which was to provide a simple, easy to consume stream of information from many sources in near real time available to millions of users/consumers on the web or mobile device .

As the service grows it will have to support:

• capturing content from more networks
• capturing content at faster rates - approaching real time
• supporting more users, with more updates/refreshes more often
• supporting more ways and devices to view/follow content (web, mobile, xml/rss, api)
• new and virtually instant demands for service driven by growth or unpredictable spikes in interest surrounding a topic (i.e. catastrophe, politically motivated uprisings or the death of a mega celebrity)

The challenge isn’t just technical, it’s also economic.  That is, given enough resources (money, time, expertise) these problems can all be readily solved, but the primary objective in scaling modern web applications is to be able to meet new demands made by users, growth and the marketplace quickly without service interruption, without reducing service quality, without reducing features and without growing costs.   In fact, effective scaling will see quality improve, performance improve, feature sets grow while the cost per user dramatically decrease.

We are launching a new series of posts on Kontexto called ‘The Follower Series’, which explores the emerging concept of ‘following’ on the web and the new types of web services that will spring up as a result.

As a bit of background on why we are launching this series of posts… Kontexto is a real-time web services company focused primarily on letting consumers ‘follow’ any part of the web as it happens. As we continue to build out new web services, it seems like a good time to start talking about ‘following’ as one of the next big opportunities on the web both for consumers and investors.

The first following service we are rolling out in the next few weeks is called @follow™ and it is a real time following service for consumers.

As a starting point, I think it’s important to redefine what we believe a follower is in the context of the Web. Traditionally followers have been defined as either people who follow another in regard to his or her ideas/beliefs OR a person who imitates or copies.

In the context of the web, I think a follower takes on a whole new meaning that captures a behavioural shift that is not so much about imitating or copying things as it is about listening, watching and following things that matter to you.

So let’s start with redefining a ‘follower’ on the web, something like this:

A ‘follower’ on the web, is a human (or machine) who through some action expresses an interest in knowing about something in ways personalized to them.

So in the context of the web, being a ‘follower’ is more about about actively following things of interest than it is about passive imitation.

We will continue to explore the emerging notion of being a ‘follower’ on the web in The Follower Series and even go back to take a look a some of the early forms of following, even though they may not have been called that… like the newspaper that used to land on our front door or the RSS feeds pumping into your readers.

There is no shortage of world events these days that are giving the ‘real time web’ its chance to develop, well, in real time.

Whether you believe in ‘real time’ (which we do), ‘near real time’ or ‘real time is a waste of time’ is not the issue. Let’s put the ‘real time’ web debate aside for now and let’s focus on what I like to call the ‘Right Now’ experience.

How can one best follow world events ‘right now’ on the web?

The Iranian election is just such an event that is demonstrating how powerful real time images, videos, blog posts and tweets really are.

Tons of separate points on the web have popped up and are updating all the time with new links, comments, opinions and coverage of the Iranian elections.

But here is the problem I have found so far as I try to educate myself on what is happening ‘right now’ with the Iranian election.

I can’t follow updates from websites in one central place in real time.

As a stop gap, I created a folder in my Google Reader with all the RSS feeds of the websites I want to follow, but the update rate is unpredictable, it does not notify me of updates and I don’t really want to hang out in my Iranian Election GReader folder all day.

What do you do when you can’t find something to solve your problem, you build something to do it.

So we are going to build a ‘Right Now’ service that will bundle websites together and update in real time.

From the get go it will be simple and easy to use on the iPhone™ and Gphone™.

Bundle a group of websites and update as quickly as possible.

In case you are interested, here is my Iran Election bundle of websites:

Iran Election Bundle

http://picfog.com/search/IranElection (Images)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/jun/16/iran-uprising (Live Blog)
http://bit.ly/Blj12 (Huff Post Live Blog)
http://tehranlive.org/ (Live Blog)
http://www.ireport.com/tags/iran_election (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/user/aligh8463 (Video)
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23iranelection (Twitter)
http://bit.ly/17n7am (GNews)
http://bit.ly/13bPuo (Gblogs)