The phrase "real-time web" may make you think about Twitter, Facebook, or perhaps real-time stock market trading, but there are actually hundreds of companies all around the world working on building and leveraging different types of real-time delivery of data online. In preparation for this week's ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a forthcoming research report on the topic, we've now had extended conversations with nearly 50 companies in this space. The breadth of offerings, technologies and strategies is amazing.

We offer below one way to think about this broad market. We hope it's useful and interesting.

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After talking to all these companies, one of the ways we decided that diversity could be explained is with a chart illustrating the continuum of real-time companies and use cases ranging from those that facilitate human-to-human communication to those that facilitate machine-to-machine communication. In between these end points there are services that mediate communication between humans through machine analysis or social objects and other servic