The Real-Time Web Has Gone to the Dogs
The steady flow and increased volume of information made available by new real-time web technologies will require new technology for consumption and different thinking for users. That's the thesis of an interesting new blog post by activity streams thought leader Chris Messina titled What can dogs tell us about the real-time web?
Messina uses research from Alexandra Horowitz's new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know as a metaphor for the change from the old document and page centric web to the new, real-time and people centric web. We've selected Messina's post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day in our lead-up to the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th.
"Did you know that a beagle's nose has 300 million receptor sites?" Messina writes, "Humans, in contrast, have about six million. And that changes everything in a dog's perception of the world."
"Imagine that we were able to interpret information at the scale and rapidity that dogs parse scent. That's where we need to go."If the speed of thinking -- and the shape of our thoughts -- have previously been confined to 93.5 square inches (the area of an eight and half by eleven sheet of paper), then our perception of reality must adjust to the scale of the web -- to draw a comparison, as though we expanded our olfactory centers from 6 to 300 million.
In his article Messina compares the way that a dog's nostrils are capable of inhaling and exhaling simultaneously, thus consuming the information around them continuously, with the human experience of real-time web flow. "In order to cope with the real-time era of the web," he writes, "we must imagine a similar augmentation of our own knowledge processing abilities if we're to cope with the deluge."
Part of that augmentation will come in the form of technical filters, something we discussed at length in yesterday's post Filtering the Real-Time Web.
User experience has been a key topic, along with filtering, in all the conversations we've been having about the real-time web. Messina is a User Experience design guy and he says this about the issue:
"Presuming that we keep the brains we have, this [vastly increased access to information] has huge ramifications for interaction and user experience design. We cannot simply apply document-based interfaces to this new, more rapid and fluid space. Instead, we need to take inspiration from the field of game design (Halo would suck if it operated at anything less than real-time); we need to think about how social search fits in and can augment our ability to filter information and make better decisions; we need to consider how one can effectively project intentions onto the web to receive better, faster, automatic service, as Doc Searls' Project VRM proposes; we need to take advantage of the always-on human network, as Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Q & A service Aardvark do; and we should embrace the natural and native speed that comes with a more conversational and people-centric web."
Messina's whole post and the comments left by his readers are worth reading. You should give him a scratch behind the ear by clicking over there too.
What do you think? Are you ready to learn to inhale and exhale information at the same time? What levers do you think will make that experience more usable for people on the web?
These are key questions that will be discussed at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit - but there's no reason to wait until then. The conversation is flowing continuously. Let us know what you'd like to contribute to it.
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If a real time, people-centric view of the Web is the next step, it raises some interesting questions. How do we (humans) process all of that information and how do we define and secure our personal space online?
At iWantMyName we think that digital identity and the domain remain the anchors around which new services emerge. But most traditional registrars have failed to satisfactorily address the coming wave by innovating for their customers.
In my opinion we are on the cusp of a paradigmatic change in how we manage information. RWW has been doing some great work tracking developments in AR. In terms of real time web, I'm sure this will continue to be a fascinating area for growth.
Hi Marshall,
I read your article and it's really fantastic. It kept me guessing what can dog say about real time web and I appreciate your way of research....
Journalists ware the news aggregators and information cleansers of the past working for newspapers.
Now information is available as raw data.
We will need aggregators and cleansers again.
The question is: will they be human (journalists) or machines?
Redundancy -- at about 5:00 a.m. yesterday the Czech prime minister announced that the Obama administration was not going to deploy a missile shield to protect Poland and the Czech Republic. More or less simultaneously several European news sources reported the same. Forty-one thousand tweets later -- about 1:00 a.m. last night -- I had learned five things in addition to the above.
There was huge redundancy in this stream of communication. The problem is not that messages are repeated. The problem is one cannot find the new information sprinkled in among the many redundant messages. Google news handles this, rather roughly, by citing a story and telling one that there are x number more like that. But Google search goes on and on without attempting to reduce the redundancy.
Communication aggregators have not attempted, as far as I know, to deal with redundancy. The word cloud, for example, is the 'opposite' of dealing with redundancy. It tells you about repetition. It does not tell you how to find those bits of new information hidden by the redundancy.
If someone can imagine how to automatically 'sniff out' the new information in a torrent of redundancy they will have helped us all.
"What levers do you think will make that experience more usable for people on the web?"
Absolutely right that document-based interfaces have to go. I'm waiting for someone to make the jump to 3D-space-based interfaces for information.
We already have rich 3D interfaces for games, but they're still mostly centered around movement and gross physical interaction. On the other side of the divide, OS X keeps making baby steps toward 3D metaphors, with Time Machine's z-axis navigation and Exposé. But why stop there?
Instead of a virtual desktop, why not a virtual landscape? The landscape is dotted with items: automated agents that accumulate data on specific topics, reference material you've personally collected for projects, avatars of the people & organizations you care about... All kinds of signals are available to draw your attention when necessary. To indicate that something's nearing a deadline, or has crossed some pre-determined threshold of interestingness, it might enlarge, or luminesce, or change color, or blink, or play a sound whose volume you experience in relation to your distance to it, as you would a real-life sound, as you fly over this landscape taking in the big picture.
Just some fun thoughts off the top of the head.
The Real-Time Web Has Gone to the Dogs http://bit.ly/n8blK (RTW Article of the Day, on dogs' sense of scent as analogy for RTW) [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/4070590857]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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September 24, 2009 10:17 AM