[dfj225]

I think there's an interesting distinction between real-time from the point of view of the user and the technology/systems providing data to the user. I agree that in the future, communication services will be less real-time, allowing users to focus their attention on the task at hand rather than the distraction that is the latest email/text message/tweet.

However, I believe the systems that do handle this communications data will need to be increasingly real-time. There will be so much data that unless it is indexed and collated in real-time, it will be impossible to perform queries to sort through mountains of un-indexed data. I think computers will become more like intelligent agents, bringing things that require immediate action to our attention and filing/organizing everything else for our later consumption.

There are already services, such as News.me and Prismatic, providing these services for Twitter. In the future, I expect the idea behind these services to be closer to the norm rather than the exception they are today.