Peripherals, they say, are the spice of life. Well, maybe they don’t say that, but they do say it about variety, and peripherals add variety to your computing life. If you’re reading this on a stock HP desktop, clicking on links with the mouse that came with it, and trusting your data to that 512MB USB stick they gave you at work, then you should consider accessorizing.

Honestly, it’s impossible to work in these conditions. I’m writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the ‘real-time’ web. Sounds awesome, right? It is.

I’ve been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I’ve been Tweeting from the audience, I’ve been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I’ve been living the real time dream – which probably explains why I haven’t done any actual work all day. And now I’m twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that’s happened this week.

Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.

Welcome, then, to a completely – and appropriately – real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.

Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project – Speedi.ly.

What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.

Here’s what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:

Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That’s where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week, is hoping to add context to search by using semantic technology to power a real-time search platform.

Ellerdale mines the real-time stream, including Tweets, RSS and the, to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content, not keyword. So If you looked up Sarah Palin on Ellerdale’s site, you’d see a semantic graph of related content, such as Oprah Winfrey (Palin just appeared on Oprah a few days ago), The Republican Party and John McCain.

“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.

Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.

So can we kill email?

For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we’ve got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley’s top VCs and veterans of the space.
Brian Singerman — Founders Fund
Ron Conway — Angel Investor
Dan’l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft
George Zachary — Charles River Ventures
Paul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeed
Andrew Braccia — Accel Partners
Michael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunch
Moderated by Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp.

We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”

Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service Smibs.

Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.

The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp.

This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.

You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.

At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.

The first randomly selected audience winner today at the RealTime CrunchUp is SuperFeedr. They are an API service that works with both XMPP and PubSubHubbub (which launched at the first CrunchUp) to create realtime content feeds.

As they noted on stage, it’s hard to demo something that is API only, but one implementation that we’ve written about before is Excla.im, which we wrote about recently. This allows for the realtime tracking of keywords on Twitter via IM. But this idea works for all content.

With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.

The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers.

At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.

You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more.

Last year, we saw the launch of identi.ca, the open-sourced alternative to Twitter. At the time, we wrote that the company was never going to rival Twitter. As it turns out, that’s not the goal of parent company StatusNet. Instead, the startup is looking to become something akin to a ‘WordPress for microblogs’. That is to say, they make a platform that others can easily download and install to their own servers. And today they’re showing off the next major step in their platform: a hosted solution for those who don’t want to bother with managing their own install, which will be hosted on status.net.

In effect, Status.Net is to the StatusNet platform as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Status.Net will offer a free package for very basic use, and will then offer a number of premium packages that give access to premium features. We first heard about the upcoming product last month when StatusNet raised $875,000, but until now they haven’t introduced the platform to the public.

I’m a big fan of keeping things simple, but that doesn’t mean things have to be bland. Google search results are pretty bland. Sure, sometimes you get returned things like YouTube thumbnails or pictures, but many results are still just a monotonous stream of blue links. Google tried to break this stream up a bit with its Search Options, an expandable feature, that gives you a left-side toolbar. But even that is just a bland series of links. Google is finally thinking about changing that.

Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”

Angstro, a 2008 TechCrunch50 startup, launched with a product that socialized the content on the web by tapping into your social graph. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today the startup is launching Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile.

In order to understand Knx.to’s virtue, it’s best to see the technology implemented in an application. Ribbit Mobile, a Google Voice competitor and cloud-based VoIP telephony service, recently launched with the capability of integrating any calls to a contact with your social networks, which was powered by Knx.to.

Qwisk, which is launching today at the Real-Time CrunchUp, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser. The site, which is a product of Y Combinator-funded company Socialbrowse, connects with you with your friends on Facebook and Twitter in real-time as you browse the web. We have 500 invites exclusively for TechCrunch users. You can redeem these invites simply by clicking here.

It’s important to note that Qwisk is a browser extension, not a plug-in to a browser. On the site’s page, you sign into your Facebook and Twitter accounts via Facebook Connect and oAuth. Qwisk will then add a sidebar to your browser that will show a feed of Facebook status updates and Tweets. You can also share any link or content to Twitter and Facebook from the sidebar itself.

Seesmic is having a huge week. The startup that develops Twitter and Facebook clients for the web and desktop just unveiled a native Windows client at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference earlier this week. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today, Seesmic is launching its first venture into the mobile space with impressive apps for both the Android and BlackBerry, which are now available for download here. This is a pivotal moment for Seesmic because the startup is now conquering all the mediums—web, desktop and mobile. I sat down with Seesmic’s co-founder, Loic Le Meur, to test out the apps.

The BlackBerry app, which works with the devices running OS 4.6 or higher, has a extremely sleek nice interface, which is optimized for BlackBerry users with all sorts of efficiencies. You can quickly change from different timelines, easily switching from your inbox, to mentions, to direct messages. Plus, you can monitor various Twitter accounts within one appp. When you send a Tweet, you can shorten a link via Bit.ly, and upload pictures or videos via yFrog. One compelling feature is the ability to email a Tweet to a contact directly from the Tweet.