The realtime web is here, now.

At just after 5pm I tweeted this tweet:

Twitter / Steve Mathew: Google Chrome OS To Launch

At 5:19pm a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) pops up in my inbox alerting me to my tweet.

No big deal? OK, get this: This means that in the 18 minutes in between, Google indexed my Twitter account (and all 79 million other Twitter feeds) found something new; indexed it into their search DB (try searching for this - it’s there!); then their Google Alerts service picked up the new entry in the Google search DB; scanned the list of alerts I and others have; found a match on “steve mathew” and fired an email message to me!

All this in less time it could take you to make a good cappuccino and drink it. And while it was doing this for me, it was doing it for millions of other folks too.

Did I mention, none of that cost me a cent?