If you would have told me before, I would not have believed it. A simple number has significantly changed my web experience when I visit my blog. Two, three, six and directly after a tweet with a link to my blog suddenly fifteen, or even more.

Fifteen what? Concurrent visitors on my blog. I am sure that a lot of you know MyBlogLog - a tool which shows you the recent readers of your blog. But what the livecommunity tool of the German Web2.0 start-up Six Groups does, is to show you your readers in real-time …

… and enable you to talk and to connect with them in real-time. I must say that in my eyes the implementation so far is not optimal - it’s this grey bar you should see now at the top of my blog (click on livestream) - but the idea is great and as they have told me, they have improvements - to make their tool more visible on a page - already on their roadmap.

I as a blogger would personally like to have this tool directly between my post and the comments section and/or in the sidebar. (Maybe you could even think about a new Wordpress comments plugin, which adds this real-time functionality) If a visitor has read a post, he then sees, that maybe twelve other readers are on this blog at the same time.

You then can start talking with them in real-time if you want and even connect with them. For me this is a big step in bringing more presence on a website (even if it’s such simple). The thing I really like about virtual worlds is, that I see other people with their avatars, who are visiting the same place, as I do.

Therefore I meet people, with similar interests, who think and wanna talk about the same things I am interested in. Six Groups brings this effect, I have known so far only from virtual worlds, onto my blog and other websites.

Great - I like that! As I have pointed out before here and here I see a bigger trend right now into the direction of more real-time conversations on the web and I also see again a big potential in interconnecting the web and the metaverse, based on this demand for real-time conversations.

Most of the live streaming tools out there - like Mogulus for example - already have (of course) an integration of live-chat - but also Facebook recently introduced a chat functionality on their site and I bet that it will not take long, until we also see that on Youtube, Flickr and other sites.

So bad news for corporations Right now they try to handle time-shifted conversations with their customers on blogs and on social network sites - if real-time is really a trend, they soon will have to manage real-time conversations with them on their websites!