With the ever growing popularity of twitter and its role in providing real time news that search engines were not traditionally able to provide, Google decided to strike a deal with twitter and include real time search results on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Real time search is the new addition to the Google Universal search which can potentially impact the face of web marketing and SEO. The real time results take up a significant portion of SERPs and can potentially push down your organic rankings below the first fold. This shows the importance of taking real time search seriously and join the micro blogging stream.
Currently real time searches seem to show mostly for hot trends and event related searches. However, we have to see how this will trend moving forward.
Even though twitter is the application that is most known for providing real time search, there are many other applications that provide micro blogging and RT search including but not limited to facebook, friendfeed, and Orkut which could join the fleet of real time search.