There's a phrase in London - 'you wait for a bus for hours then 3 turn up at once'. Last week certainly lived up to that phrase, with 3 good geeky events arriving altogether on Thursday evening. Typical, but Mashup and the 'Real-Time Social Web' it had to be.

Defining what is considered 'real-time' proved an interesting discussion. The moderator Sam Sethi commented that Twitter is only the start of the real-time Web. He sees email as the new snail mail, RSS and blogging to be quite 'old Web' and noted how Techmeme (a Web news aggregator) now often seems to be behind the curve. Twitter, he said, is as close to being live as you can get. It is 'good enough' and considered by most to be real-time.

Alan Patrick of Broadsight pointed out that Twitter is not technically 'real time' - there is a lag (if only a small one). The closest you can get to 'live' would have to be the live streaming of video (such as Qik, Kyte and Ustream).

What is rather amusing is that although it was decided early on in the conference that we were not going to talk much about Twitter, Twitter just kept on twittering its way back to the top...

Ways in which brands are using Twitter successfully were discussed, with Nick Halstead pointing to the fact that Dell has made over $1million directly from Twitter. Dell have 19 English speaking accounts with which they track and respond to questions immediately, engaging with their audience in the correct way.  Also mentioned was @lastminute_com which sends out last minute deals 10 minutes before they put them on the website. This type of Twitter use can add huge value to brands.

Various Twitter Apps were mentioned, including:

• Twiddla - Co-browse websites in a shared, real-time whiteboard
• Twittervision - See who is tweeting where in the world in real-time
• Phweet - Talk and create conference calls with your Twitter friends
• Mr Tweet  - This analyses your network and suggests new friends

Finally - back to video - an interesting question was raised: 'why didn't video chat on mobile phones really take off?'. 'Bad quality' was the answer generally agreed on. Now that Hi-Definition video is available, which makes it possible to see the subtlety of gestures, the consensus was that video chat on mobile might be successful.

This is just a very brief highlight summary of what was a very lively and interesting debate. Would you use video chat on your mobile? And what do you consider real-time?