Any of you familiar with the popular tech news site Digg have probably seen
Digg Spy, a page on the site that shows activity in real-time. Watch it for a few seconds... how many other activity-viewing web pages actually update themselves magically like that? I was thinking about conventional forums sites for a while, and they seem pretty stagnant from an interaction perspective... you must manually refresh a page to view posting activity.
How awesome would a forum site be if posts appeared on today's posts/VNP in real-time, as they were submitted? I don't know exactly what would be involved, but
this guy makes it seem pretty simple (at least from the front-end) to make a live, updating spy page.
One thing that would probably be wise to avoid, however, would be live-updating threads... people would begin to treat the forum like a real-time chat site. But I think a "spy page" a la Digg would be incredibly awesome.
Now, the challenge would be vB integration... but something interesting to think about.