(Originally published at Atlantic Free Press)

by Richard G. Kastelein

If we all thought the Facebook and Twitter social media growth phenomena were extraordinary, wait until Social TV hits your screens.

And it’s not as far away as you think — not only with the logical IPTV market, but also terrestrial TV. I recently attended the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam, which bills itself as ’The content creation management delivery experience’. IBC2008 attracted 49,000+ visitors and 1,300+ exhibitors from more than 130 countries. This year is expected to be bigger. Last year, I was part of a team exhibiting at MIPTV in Cannes, and was expecting something a bit similar… but this was almost all about hardware and software and less about the actual formats and programs. However, this was not a disappointment. For embedded in the show there were some jewels… which have profoundly altered my view of Social Media, the future and the implication of reach that will touch billions not millions.
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View the short introductory video by Google where it announces you can discover breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks! After Bing has introduced Twitter results in its search results, now it’s time for Google to show its abilities.

Finally, it was bound to happen that Google is displaying real-time results from microblogs, blogs and social networks, next to this news, Google announced as well partnerships with Facebook, Myspace to get real-time data and not to forget, the deal from October with Twitter.

What are the effects and implications of Google’s real-time search and what questions are being raised?
* Will SEO be expanded with optimizing tweets and other public data as well?
* Will all this real-time data be available in Google Analytics, the social media monitoring market will have a new worthy competitor?
* Is Google Search the right place for real-time data (in combination with ‘historic’ data)?
* Will users make use of Google as an aggregator more and more (kind of Friendfeed), or will they make use of each network because it’s more relevant contextually (Google in time will integrate that as well)?
* Will real-time efforts be mechanized just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* If Google will prove its importance to real-time search, what about SPAM just to make sure that people or companies rank high in the search results?
* How will real-time results weigh against ‘normal’ search results?

When Google launches new tools, it almost always reshapes or at least shakes up the established Internet landscape.
This is not so bad, it keeps companies focused and it ignites creativity and innovation to come up with solutions for questions as the abovementioned.

If you were the devil’s advocate, what questions would you raise?