In just the past couple of years, several developments have come together to make the Web more of a real-time experience: ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections; a growing number of mobile devices such as the iPhone with full Web browsers; and new Web technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data. That mix has made always-on, real-time communications easy and addictive. The iconic example, Twitter, attracted 44.5 million people to its Web site in June, plus perhaps an equivalent number who gain access to its services via other sites and software. Facebook’s 250 million active users, whose instant status updates are a key part of its appeal, share more than 1 billion videos, photos, and other content each week.

“Real-time” is actually a bit of a misnomer. Most of this activity doesn’t truly occur in real time, the way talking on the phone does, and social gestures such as sharing links with friends are just as important a part of the appeal as immediacy. These gestures—often accompanied by data from people’s profiles on social networks, such as where they live or their age—hold the key to the real-time Web’s moneymaking potential. What people are tweeting and sharing could be a potent indicator of their interests and intentions: When people type in a response to Twitter’s home-page question “What are you doing?” their answers also may reveal what they want to buy—right now.

It may be splitting hairs, but it seems that the key to unlocking corporate funding for ‘social media’ initiatives may be to relabel the approach in language CFOs and CEOs can understand: the real-time web. Or as Bill Gates put it more than a decade ago: Business at the Speed of Thought.