"Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes," wrote TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld recently. Pack a lunch and bring your paddle, there's likely no turning back upstream.

If you're finding you're spending less time going to big portals such as MSN and Yahoo! for news and email, and sticking on social media sites, consuming and sharing content with friends, you're mid-stream already, headed toward a rolling river, and perhaps the future of the Web.

I've read the big brains of Silicon Valley variously coin this shift  "The Stream", "The River", "The Real-Time Web", over the last year or so. Whatever you want to call it, Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms have pushed our interaction with the web, and each other, into overdrive and the realm of nowness (thanks again Erick),  where we may soon stop trying to keep our heads above the surface, dog-paddling to keep pace with information onslaught via destination-to-destination web surfing.

The much-hyped Twitter and the developing situation in Iran serves as a great example of the power of The Stream's ability to disseminate unfettered information across the web in near-time at least. Do a search on Twitter for '#Iranelection', and you'll get back a endless sea of tweets, tweeted seconds ago, that include eyewitness reports - even pleas for help - from Iranians protesting the election results, as they are doing the physical protesting. You'll also find links to unfiltered photos and videos shot from cell phones of clashes with government police and paramilitary posted so quickly that CNN finds itself sourcing Twitter for breaking news and footage.

In fact, there's a Twitter search result tagged '#cnnfail', deriding CNN's lack of timely, prominent coverage of the election protests in favour of Jonas Brothers profiles.  Twitter's crowd-powered heft also has users all over the world changing their location to 'Tehran' on Twitter amid an information war to throw off Iranian government officials trying to shut down actual Iranians protesting the elections on Twitter.

'Unfettered, 'Unfiltered' clearly present the biggest downside to following news on Twitter and other social media platforms, leaving the passive viewer in need of a little context, mid-stream.

New site Almost.at does an impressive job at lending perspective to the social media mob-voice by dividing user updates on real-time events that span popular user-driven sites into text, photo and link categories; see what events people are tweeting about on the left hand-side of the screen, then click on related links on the right-hand side, which often go to mainstream sites, such as BBC and NY Times for the broader story.

Even on Almost.at, like most social media platforms, communication between users around real world events tend to cling to one element of that event, such as changing your Twitter location to Tehran (which author William Gibson is calling 'Tehraning' via Twitter),  and thus drowning out actual updates from the event itself.

Google has a product in Beta that's trying to harness The Stream in the soon-to-be released 'Wave'  (it's all about water). The book's still out on exactly what Wave is, but the sneak preview sells it as an all-encompassing mega-platform for communication and collaboration in real-time. This could mean: Friend A sends a wave to their pals, which you can see being formed as they type it, that they really want to go to Costa Rica for March Break.. You, friend B, have been to Costa Rica, so you embed a video in the 'Costa Rica' part of their message that links to a YouTube video of that awesome surfing spot you went to last year. Friends A,B,C, and D can see the message, and friend B adds that Nicaragua is actually just as beautiful, and cheaper, and further edits the Wave by sharing Flickr photos and a link to user reviews of their favourite off-the-beaten path paradise on Tripadvisor. But wait, friend B warns that there's been a recent wave of Swine Flu in that region and you should check out his or her link to the related World Health Organization site update.

If Google Wave sounds like instant messaging-meets-Twitter-meets-Facebook on steroids, you're right, and it's all happening right now, all at once, and no one person owns it

Annoying, dizzying and fascinating, The Stream looks like the future of the Web, so stop worrying and jump in... just don't forget your paddle.