3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web
Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways.
Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away, about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet.
The Real Time Web is coming so fast we've hardly had any time to think about it yet. So let's do that, shall we? The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery of activity streams to their users. Paul Buchheit, the man who built the first versions of both Gmail and Adsense, says the real time web is going to be the next big thing. Buchheit's FriendFeed is a key point of innovation in real time. Social media ping server Gnip promised to turn everything online into Instant Messaging-style XMPP feeds, and though that's been put on hold in favor of more immediately clear value - we've still got our fingers crossed. Our investigation of companies like Bit.ly and OneRiot this morning turned up even more big news that's right around the corner for the Real Time Web.
But what's the point? What's in it for us, as users? We offer below three models of value that we suspect will be found in the Real Time Web. They are the concepts that underly the vision described above at the top of this post. Those concepts are Ambiance, Automation and Emergence. This is just an initial exploration of ideas, reality will undoubtedly be more complicated shortly. We welcome your participation in thinking about this part of the fast-approaching future of the web.
Ambiance
The web is made up of web pages linked together, but hovering around many of those pages are now social media signals like blog posts, bookmarks, tweets and other URLs that refer to a page but aren't visible when you're looking at it. The same is true for concepts. Most of us use Google to find pages about things we're looking for, but Google prioritizes historical inbound links and the text on pages.
In the above image you can see a custom search engine we use here at ReadWriteWeb, with Mark Carey's Twitter on Google greasemonkey script running on top of it. If you want to know about streaming video, Forrester's, Jeremiah Owyang, has a running list of vendors in the space (1) and that's where you want to start - but wouldn't you like to know about the very freshest (2) live streaming vendors on the market as well? That's what people are talking about, in real time, on Twitter.
In our experience these Twitter augmented search results are valuable because they are up to the minute - but sometimes they are also just better.
Someday you'll be able to discover Owyang's list and be prompted to view the most recent, the most authoritative and the most "socially relevant to you" conversations about the same concept going on all around the web. People are working on all of that and as research-lovers we hope they succeed.
The point is that no matter what you're doing on the web, there are valuable related activities going on elsewhere - probably simultaneously. Exposing those is exciting.
Automation
We probably should have started out with this, but what's the most obviously valuable example of clear value in real-time information delivery in recent internet history? Blackberry and the push email!
We tend to assume that the real time web is something we'll be looking at constantly, because it's constantly bringing up new information. That doesn't have to be the case, though. The real time web could very well just do its thing and notify us, in real time, of important events. Thresholds crossed. Simple changes made.
For example, when the already controversial Google Chrome Terms of Service were changed again last December, I got an SMS sent to my phone notifying me that it had been changed. I was able to jump online, grab a screenshot of the changes from the application that was monitoring the document and report on the change before anyone else.
I certainly wasn't watching for the change. A robot was doing that for me and let me know about the change in near real time. It was pretty awesome, but it wasn't real time and the services I patched together to do it are all marginal enough that they often don't work or are very late. Put real time at the center of the web and we'll be able to automate all kinds of information monitoring. At first it will be a competitive advantage for those who use it strategically; then it will just change the game, become standard practice and require competitive knowledge workers to come up with something else that's new.
Emergence
One of the things that will be good to automate is the emergence of hot topics. Generally or regarding specific concepts or keywords.
In the above screen, for example, Postrank has discovered that a Google Blogsearch search result about Oregon State University has received two comments and one inbound link. That's an unusually high amount of activity lately on that topic, Postrank says. Imagine real time link-shortener clickthrough stats being taken into consideration as well. Imagine real time notification of the fact that this threshold has been crossed. That sounds like valuable information delivery to have automated, doesn't it?
We watch a number of kinds of feeds like this. We're subscribed to a feed of videos shared on FriendFeed and "liked" by 2 or more of my friends, for example.
Of course this will work much better if people continue to publish, comment, link and click online more than they are. The more total signal there is the more granular and meaningful our thresholds for automatic notification can be. It also depends on all these technologies getting meaningful development support. The last generation of advanced services like this, a long list of RSS based apps, did not, and so they have withered on the vine. This real time wave has money and enthusiasm behind it, though, so hopefully it will be able to fulfill its potential.
Make no mistake about it - people really are interested this time. Tweetmeme, a groundbreaking new service focused on many of the very same things discussed above, has already been talked about enough to have more than 220k results appear in a Google search for its name. That's four times as many as Zaptxt and fifteen times as many Pingie, two of the best consumer level RSS to IM/SMS services, and they've been online for years.
Ambiance, Automation and Emergence. Those are three forms of value I can see emerging from the Real Time Web. Please share your thoughts in the comments section below. The better we understand these kinds of tools, the more effective we'll be able to be at using them. The strategies above are just hacked together Web 2.0 stuff, but it works pretty well. The world is changing, the tools at our disposal will soon be different and that will have unpredicatable consequences. Add real time to the semantic web and social/machine learning hybrid technologies and the future of the web is likely to be unrecognizable.
Maybe this is all obvious and I'm the only one who thinks it's really super exciting - but I don't think so. I've been tempted to keep these kinds of strategies and practices that we're working on here at ReadWriteWeb quiet, lest our competiors make use of them and erode any competitive advantage our particular strategies might offer us. (We're sure they've got similar methods themselves.) There are certainly some research methods we've developed that we don't discuss, but generally speaking - the world is a whole lot bigger than a handful of tech blogs that at the highest level get a few million unique visitors each month. (What real time strategies are you developing that are like TechCrunch, BusinessInsider, Venturebeat, Gigaom, in order to get a piece of the media landscape still dominated by the last century's giants?) Social web technologies, including this emerging field of Real Time, are disrupting a whole lot of the world and all of us focused on them have a common interest in advancing the craft of using them. That's especially true among people for whom social good is important, as well as profit.
So let's all reach into our magic bags of search tools together and pull out big results - dripping with sparkling ephemera born just moments ago.
Title image "Street Magic" Creative Commons by Flickr user a_whisper_of_unremitting_ demand. Note, if you're a developer interested in helping RWW build the next generation of real time research tools, the turntable for our DJs, email marshall [at] readwriteweb.com subject line "real time magic".
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Marshall:
Thanks for this post and the ideas. How do you expose the related activities so they are filtered? When does the problem of signal to noise happen with "real-time" web or do we avoid because the information is being filtered through our friends?
I also wonder what happens to reflection and sense of context by only being in the presence or the latest.
Beth, thanks for the comment! Very thoughtful questions. A few responses:
"How do you expose the related activities so they are filtered?"
- Right now I'm just thinking of full text search like you see above in the Twitter Greasemonkey example with Jeremiah's list. I do like to search for related stuff in FriendFeed, though, using a Firefox plug-in called Drag and Drop Zones. In the future I'm hoping that semantic analysis will auto-tag related activities, too.
"When does the problem of signal to noise happen with "real-time" web or do we avoid because the information is being filtered through our friends?"
- Signal to noise is always going to be a problem, I think, when there is so much of both. Friends, "authority," conceptual relatedness and just eyeballing for high value stuff are all going to play into it. I suspect that the ability to eyeball through a large quantity of information and quickly recognize the good stuff is a human skill that computers will make progress on but never match.
"I also wonder what happens to reflection and sense of context by only being in the presence or the latest."
-I'm sorry, I can't think of a response to that right now, something just happened on Twitter. No, well - that's been an issue for everyone, forever, hasn't it? I think you've just got to make time to reflect. For context, I do think some of these search tools will help. There are still human skills required though.
Those are my thoughts, would love to know how you'd answer these same questions, Beth or other readers.
Posts like these are why I read this site. I'm still digesting it, but thanks for this article.
Thanks Matt. Unfortunately posts like this take a lot of time, so we're going to need to keep running sports and celebrity gossip articles in order to pay my salary. ;)
Not sure I grasped more than 30% of the content in your post, but it sounds as fascinating as Robin Good's concept of 'Newsmastering' sounded to me in 2006. Now, I 'get' newsmastering. Maybe I'll 'get' these 3 applications not very much later ;-)
Thanks for making us THINK!
All success
Dr.Mani
DrMani - you rock! I was *this close* to bringing up Robin Good and Newsmastering in the post! That was totally part of the inspiration here and you saw it, that's awesome. I do hope that the more widespread enthusiasm for real time will take it further than rss/newsmastering has made it so far. The failure of that paradigm to create sweet jobs for scores of people is honestly a really sad part of social media's young history. That's kind of what I was alluding to when I talked about the lack of support the last similar paradigm got.
Readers unfamiliar with all of this can check out this interview I did with Robin Good 3 years ago http://www.netsquared.org/robingood1
Definitely, a heady post.
This real-time aspect is making us "re-learn" the web, both as organizations and as end-users. Content is being rewired. Whoever re-learns and re-finds the fastest will do better in this next phase.
But a downside to real-time is that it tempts you to over-analyze small trends that aren't always significant. It's like looking at an hourly stock chart when a daily or weekly trend is more telling.
Therefore, as exciting and valuable as the real-time web is, we shouldn't forget to also pause it, step back and reflect on it, so we're not caught in its daily whirlwind. We need to keep the bridges between the real-time web and the web.
Really enjoyed this interpretation of things, Marshall. Real time itself is a step towards the ubiquitous web we'll see eventually. (Is it too early to talk about Web 5.... thousand?)
Seriously though, addressing 'reflection and sense of context by only being in the presence or the latest.' I think we can't expect all this to ever take the place of human judgement.
In the end, there's still one of us at the helm of the wheel. We shouldn't expect to take that out of the process.
Then again...
If your web service isn't real-time, you will be out of business when this recession is over.
Engago - I feel like I make a lot of extreme comments, but I think you take the cake!
I like the idea of getting an SMS (or a tweet!) when a page has changed. What service or tool did you use?
A very interesting and thought provoking article, I'm intrigued by the Real Time Web vision but even more so with the magic bag containing sparkling ephemera (is that legal)!
Ambiance, Automation and Emergence could be the Three Little Pigs from the fairy tale, which will become the Straw, Sticks and Bricks? What will eventually provide the most value?!
Once again Marshall, you have triggered the ideation of my soul. I don't have the technical skills to engage in these discussions - or developments - but I have the imagination and intuition that allows me to see practical applications in the future! Thanks for your awesome writing and reporting!
Posted by: Gary Walter
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May 8, 2009 5:06 AM
I like your three value propositions. They make sense.
However apart from security offices, infotainment people, and stock-market monkeys, I really do not see the point, apart in some specific situations, of having real-time information.
First, because in many cases, real-time does not mean persistent and accurate. The "real-time" information you get at one second could develop into something else the next second, that would lead to different thinking/decisions. So as a decision-maker I wouldn't rely solely on this, which means that it loses a good part of its "real-time" value as I'm going to seek some "persistent" information elsewhere, which is going to take time. Of course, the online world being essentially "im-mediate" (meaning it's always there at hand) is very sensitive to reaction times, but I do not believe that this is the case for the rest of the world: there, the cases where it is crucial to react in real time are scarce, and when they occur it's generally because of a real-world problem that is not going to be an easy one. In the end, if I am interrupted by an information that both is important and requires immediate reaction, then the "real-time" component has created value. Otherwise, that component destroys value (by wasting my time) more than it creates.
Then, what's the quality of the information you can get real-time ? Looking at what we get from Twitter : either it's opinion leaders promoting their opinions (which I really doesn't requires anything close to real-time), or it's people telling their lives. Okay, sometimes, people in this category state "this service has stopped working" which when it is a large-scale online service can be damaging and alert you as a decision-maker if your teams still haven't figured out but hey, you're not going to wait for your customer to call in when your service stops working, right ? This has value anyway when aggregated, but no real-time value, and only on the condition that you can segment the crowd, which is currently about a dream. And finally, what do these people do with their lives ? Is it their only occupation to tell expose their lives to the public and hope for the world to watch ?
Anyway, again, I'm probably just a grudgy backwards European who does not understand the power of all this. :)
Very interesting.. This is the very reason why everyone is so informed about what was going on around us. I think we should expect more and more features to come..
Visionary and true. Don't you find that Google search results are not as useful as they used to be because they lack the time element of "when" things happened and the context of the discussion around them? Wonder if Google will wake up and take note- their bread and butter search product is beginning to feel dated. Great post (as usual).
Great post, as usual.
I don't have the "real time" to hack up this, but for the Ambiance, I'd mashup these in a greasemonkey script:
- post the currently visible article to a term extractor (calais, zemanta, yahoo) via AJAX
- do a search on twitter, friendfeed, postrank and tweetmeme for each of these terms
- and normalize/dedupe the resulting rss-feeds/item-lists through a yahoo pipe.
But here's the tough one: how would you visualize it?
Would you only like a Top-10-List, a top 1 ("you better read this instead"), a wordle/tag-cloud or even a tabbed list with each result in a seperate column?
Would you want to drill down into semantic sub-categories (headup?) or explore ideas in a mind-map-like fashion, or just a heatmap overlay of the current article?
And how much time can all this take until you are pinged about another update? :-)
Nice article.
What I really want is on-demand real time information. Give me the most up to date information I need when I ask for for it. The continuous stream can be overwhelming and a distraction.
bjoernklose - hot!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 8, 2009 9:54 AM
Thought a little more about this, Marshall - and posted some thoughts to my blog here:
http://MoneyPowerWisdom.com/here-comes-real-time-web/
Dr.Mani
Very interesting and thought provoking.
We had been thinking of enhancing value of our offering by doing something on lines of real time interest feeds + mashup + user contributed/rated organized info bytes. Your post has triggered some new thoughts.
These are the kind of posts for which my respect for RWW has always been higher than for other popular blogs.
Thanks.
I think Björn has the best comment so far regarding current patterns of thinking vs the future.
The way I see it, RT web is basically a reverse RSS in that rather than having a server publish a document, clients request a subscription. Then, as news comes in, the server spams it out to those who've requested the service.
It could either be like the network broadcast flag (TCP/IP) or a shoutcast server multicast where you have to subscribe to the group, or better, a peer-to-peer distributed service.
AIS ship tracking is real-time, sporting a compact twitter-sized byte payload, but is rather verbose, with hundreds of messages per second for the US west coast. Thousands of RT subscribers would require IT infrastructure capable of spewing 1 million+ TCP packets per second.
The only low-cost means of implementing a viable RT web app would be to leverage peer-to-peer technology. A "twister" if you will, (twitter-napster) could scale quite effectively, since subscribers would need to run or receive RT notifications via some mechanism, be it cell-phone, email, SMS, p2p software, etc.
Profiteers could charge for SMS, email and cell-phone notifications, but provide free services if they agree to run p2p software on the company's behalf.
great great post!
we are also trying to build a truly real time online magazine. you might want to check it out...
http://www.all140.com
would be happy to know what you guys think
lukas
"...The two hottest technologies online, Twitter and Facebook, are fast integrating real-time delivery..."
and Google Reader??
Here is another example of realtime trend, http://echowaves.com
It's an opensource project created by developers that were dissatisfied with facebook and twitter. Unlike twitter it does not have a message length limitation, unlike facebook it's very simple (no 100 ways of doing the same thing). And unlike both of these, it's real-time. As soon as you post a message it will show up on the screen of everyone who has that same page opened.
Real Time:in case you missed it late last night, we published a big post titled "3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web" http://bit.ly/a2wW5 [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/1737882205]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 24, 2009 10:48 AM
@ahermosa
Totally agree with you, what about Google Reader...
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Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways.