An app is a program. App stands for application, and its meaning in this case comes from the programmer community. When you think of a program on a computer, you may think to call it software or call it a program, but programmers (code developers) call them applications. This is probably due to the fact that multiple applications can be knitted together to make a larger program. Some people feel that their apps need to operate in real-time, and in some cases they do--here is why.
Some apps may be used to monitor sales
A sale via an eCommerce site is very exciting, but often requires the owner to check his or her email. A real-time email app may help them to do this, but since a business email account is likely to be bogged down with multiple messages per day, it could be over 24 hours before the webmaster even sees that he or she has made a sale. An app that monitors sales in real-time will allow the webmaster to keep all of his/her sales in the same area (via the notifications from the app). And, it will allow the webmaster to act quickly on a sale, so that a product may be posted by the end of the day.
It need not even be an eCommerce site. Such real-time apps would also work well with something such as eBay and Amazon. In fact, an app that monitors both at the same time, and in real-time, would be in very high demand.
Some apps are built to monitor PPC profits
There are plugins for the FireFox browser that already measure PPC profits in real-time. It is not too much of a stretch to see how a real-time app that may be installed on a phone, computer or other web browser, may be in high demand.
Some apps are built to monitor web analytics
Google Analytics is in real-time, which just goes to show that these sorts of metrics are in demand when it comes to real-time functionality. Building an app that works on a mobile device or a desktop computer would offer a large number of benefits for the webmaster.
Some apps are built to monitor social media
The social network managers have created mobile apps that monitor social media for new messages. But, there are now a lot of third party developers that allow people to see when they have a message from different social media sites (i.e. not one at a time). There are also real-time apps that monitor social media mentions and links. People often like to see these things in real-time because they want to be part of the conversation, and catch the social media users as they are actually commenting.
Some apps are built to monitor the progress of other online applications
There are other online applications such as Internet polls, games and advertising apps that people wish to monitor. Being able to monitor such things in real-time is very satisfying for the person who installed or uses the app.
Some apps are built to inform people of certain things
The most common use for these types of apps is to monitor online message. Emails have to be checked routinely in order to see if any new messages have arrived. There are now numerous apps for mobile devices that monitor emails. These are often based in real-time, which allow people to see when they have just received a new message. These types of apps are often produced by the email management companies themselves, but a lot of third party apps have been created to monitor emails across a number of email accounts.
An app may be built to monitor RSS feeds in real-time
It may seem silly, but some people are very eagerly awaiting the next newest posts on websites and blogs. These are the sort of people that have to check their RSS feeds hourly on the publication day. You could save them a lot of bother if you were to create a real-time RSS feed monitor. The fact that tools such as Google Alerts exists, is proof that people are looking for information as it is posted online. Your real-time, RSS feed monitoring, app could help these people out an awful lot.
About Author: Kate Funk is a passionate guest blogger and online tutor at tutortop.com.