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.

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".

Given the current economy, there may be fewer applications and services to try next year. Whatever will we early adopters do? We love to flit from service to service, trying the latest shiny new thing, endlessly discussing whether or not it will stick, whether it will "cross the chasm." Without the endless barrage of new services being released one after another, in 2009 we may find ourselves having to more deeply embrace the ones we have left. More importantly, we'll finally have the time to figure out how we can really integrate them (or not) into our daily lives.

As we discover how to better manage the social media apps we added to our daily workflow during 2008, we may end up turning a more critical eye towards any newcomers in 2009. Enriched with a better understanding that doesn't come just from being enamored of "shininess," but from experiences that grew over time, we may question the new arrivals in ways we never did before. What value does this bring me?, we'll ask. Is this really doing anything new?

Thankfully, the answer to that last one will likely be "yes," as the funding possibilities for straight up clones of popular services will probably be dialed back in 2009.

What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better

For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves drawn to the apps, services, and features that helped us better organize the madness that is information overload. We added our friends to lists in both FriendFeed and Tweet Deck, we categorized our RSS feeds and even cleared out some for good, we de-friended the strangers we had collected on Facebook, we synced our social network friend lists, and we found ways to multi-post to our preferred networks. Yes, we became more efficient..but there's still so much room for improvement.

Our Social Media Wish List

Perhaps next year, we'll see more apps that help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day. We have some thoughts about what we would like to see and we hope that 2009 will bring these ideas to fruition.

• Google Reader add-ins and/or Greasemonkey scripts:We want Labs for Google Reader! It seems Google is more interested in revamping the Reader UI than giving us any real tools to deal with our RSS overload. If they won't help, then someone else should. We would love to see tools that let us view our feeds based on our attention data, without having to manually reorganize the feeds ourselves. We also want duplicates marked as read - if we read a friend's shared item from a feed we subscribe to, why do we have to see it again as we plow through our unread feeds? Finally, we need tools that let us better filter our subscriptions to reduce noise. Why can't we click a button to hide all the posts where someone has spliced in their delicious links or Twitter updates, for example?
• Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard? The tools could parse our friends' Twitter profiles, for example, to categorize people based on location, business, or company. All the local people could be in one list. Everyone whose profile says "SEO" in another. Anyone in the top 50 or 100 users (based on followers/friends) in a third list called "noteworthy." Just because we want to customize and personalize our lists doesn't mean we couldn't use a little help getting started with the task.
• More Friend Synchronization tools: We want to friend you - really we do - but it's hard because you're here and there and everywhere. To make matters worse, you don't even use the same username on Digg as you do on Twitter. How will we ever find you? What we want is a tool that allows us to friend people, with one click on all the networks we possibly can, according to our preferences. It should also be able to delve into our social graph and sync up the friends we have already added.
• Friend List Sanitizers: OK, we followed/friended you, but we don't know why. We don't know you, we don't have any friends in common, in fact, we think you might have requested our friendship by mistake. So why are you still in our Facebook friends list? We need tools that help us clean up our lists to remove the accidental "stranger friendings" left over from our MySpace days. Even better, the tool could compare our Facebook list to our FriendFeed or Twitter friends to see if we know you elsewhere in order to determine whether to retain or remove the friendship.

These are just a few social media tools we would like to see developed in 2009. What are yours?

We decided to follow up on and reprint that post here on a late Friday afternoon. We're sure many of readers either didn't see it at the time or hadn't yet discovered ReadWriteWeb. Not everyone who did read it agreed with our conclusions, so after the post below we've added some of our favorite pro and con comments from the original, plus a cool personal story from a member of the RWW community. What do you think? Does online noise play a meaningful role in your life?

Blogs, RSS, IM, Twitter and FriendFeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. It's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. Especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

Experiments in Noise Control

There are many ways you can roughly cut down on the noise in your information stream. More emerge all the time and this is a very valuable direction for services to be exploring. We don't want to argue that noise is always good, it's clearly important to spend some time without it every day.

The most recent entry into the noise filtering scene is probably FriendFeed's new "best of" feature. Late last night FriendFeed rolled out the ability to view just the items most popular with your friends on the service for the last day, week or month. It's something many people have been hoping for and there's no doubt it will prove useful. If you're not using FriendFeed yet, you can check it out and add me as a friend if you like here.

Other services that are good for filtering out noise are del.icio.us popular for a particular tag, AideRSS and Google Reader's overly friendly shared items from friends feature. We'd love to read about your favorite noise filtering tools in comments below.

On the Beauty of Noise

Filtering isn't everything it's cracked up to be, though, and you wouldn't want to live in a fully filtered world all the time. Social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. Hear are some reasons why.

Unexpected opportunities.

Some people call it "serendipity," others call it "passive and opportunistic information acquisition." (Erdelez, see below.) The less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for.

Scanning quickly over large quantities of roughly relevant information can turn up invaluable resources, opportunities, context and contacts that you can passively process or opportunistically leverage at will.

Future Needs

It's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. Who can't remember doing that before?

The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. A person with a substantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.

Maximizing Recall

Some people worry that being exposed to too much information will lead to not remembering very much of it. Scientists say that's not necessarily the case, though. Sanda Erdelez, for example, wrote the following in her study Information Encountering: It's More Than Just Bumping into Information

A majority of participants in my information encountering study, when asked about their past experiences of "bumping into information," were familiar with the notion of accidental discovery of information and could recall these experiences clearly

We may be afraid that we won't remember key information that rushed past us in a river of news, but Erdelez argues that when prompted about a particular incident of accidental discovery our memories are better than we might think.

We would argue here in fact that the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future. One useful strategy may be to spend some time going through a large amount of information just a touch more quickly than we're comfortable with.

General Knowledge

Beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wisdom and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. Spend some time skimming, it'll make you a better person. You'll meet new people, learn new things - don't worry, it's fun.

Personal Growth

Serendipitous search in the offline world is believed to be one of the ways our understanding of the world expands. David Pescovitz at BoingBoing writes about Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson's PhD thesis titled Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects:

"Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable," Ottoson argues "materialize in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach."

That's more than just a beautiful reason you should read BoingBoing, it's an interesting understanding of the way that swimming through noise helps us become who we are.

Conclusion

Quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things - essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. We argue, though, that the opposite of all those things - online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.

So take some time for yourself when you can, find a nice place to sit with a cup of tea and blow through a few hundred items in your RSS reader. If you can relax into it, it'll help you remember some of the reasons why you love the internet.

Creative Commons photos, Christmas 2007 series, by Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

Following up on this post

We write enough here everyday and read enough around the web that sometimes looking back at a post from earlier in the same year can feel like we're visiting another planet. This post, though, still feels pretty familiar.

A few things have changed, for sure. Hutch Carpenter, the blogger who made the chart in this posts about different ways to relate to noise, got a job at enterprise social bookmarking startup Connectbeam - in part, he says in announcing his new position, because of his use of FriendFeed! That's pretty heart warming.

In announcing his new job, Hutch wrote the following:

FriendFeed opened my eyes to the possibilities of knowledge as the basis of relationships. The ways in which content from a variety of sources is a powerful, addictive basis for learning, conversations and collaboration. How activity streams are compelling reads. I've been active on FriendFeed since March, and it shocks me how much I know about web 2.0 and technology in general versus last year. I've still got much to learn, and FriendFeed will continue to be a good source for that.

Diverse Reactions from Readers

Hutch's is a pretty happy ending to a story about noise, but not everyone who read our original post agreed with it.

One dissenter summarized a number of peoples' positions well when he wrote: "The web is about ME first and then comes the noise driven by the hype and the false version of truth that is popularity." That commenter, who went by the name "directeur," is building a startup based on this belief of his called FeedEgo.com. It's a personal relevance based feed reader and it's worth checking out, even if we do disagree with its creator about relevance vs. noise.

Some commenters said that balance was really what's most important. "Portland Broker" for example, wrote that "As with most everything, I think it's a matter of balance. Noise is everywhere; sometimes it's serendipitous, often it's not. A world that is overly filtered is lacking, just as one that is not filtered at all."

How can you as a person online create that kind of balance? Iconoclastic tech/culture blogger Stetoscope suggested the following: " I think what makes noise unbearable is the guilty feeling we have to not read everything. But if we takes some times to dive in the noise, without feeling guilty of what we have missed, it is just a positive habit." We like that advice and it sounds like it could work well with some of the tips we shared in a post last Spring titled Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader.

What do you think? Is social media noise good for you? How has it been treating you lately? If you believe in the need for balance, what are your favorite ways to create it?

Just recently, we polled the Twitter audience about their love (or not) of FriendFeed by asking the following question: "If you could only answer YES or NO, how would you answer this question: "Do You Love FriendFeed?" The reason for posing the question this way to not allow for qualified responses like "well, the service has potential, but at the moment it...." or anything of that manner.

In the end, the responses were decidedly mixed, and surprisingly, a lot of NO's turned up. At final count on Twitter it was 16 NO's to 10 YES's. (Of course, on FriendFeed, the ratio was a bit different...and, as is typical on FriendFeed, a conversation ensued.) While most FriendFeed users agree that the service is great for sharing content and starting conversations, a good many will also admit that FriendFeed hasn't yet hit the sweet spot when it comes to combating info overload.

Growing or Fading?

So where does that leave FriendFeed now? On the one hand, you have people like Steve Rubel claiming that he now has over 5000 people following him on Friendfeed - 60% of what he has on Twitter. That certainly seems to show promise for the FriendFeed service. Even with all of Twitter's issues, the service is bordering on mainstream, having already been used for presidential debates, MTV awards shows, and for tweeting news from the Mars Rover. For FriendFeed to even come close to rivaling Twitter numbers, there must be something there.

However, on the other hand, you have the king of early adopters himself, Robert Scoble, sharing a post in Google Reader entitled "Why Have I Been Neglecting FriendFeed?" by Kyle Lacy. In the post, Lacy cites information overload, burnout, and increased work responsibilities among other things, as reasons for his neglect. But what's really interesting is the comment Scoble left when sharing the feed:

Wait! Stop the presses! Robert Scoble tired of FriendFeed?! If Scoble is the canary in the coal mine of social media, what does this mean for the rest of us? (Note: he appears to have gotten over this).

Still, we wonder - is a FriendFeed burnout on the horizon? Or is it only a matter of FriendFeed adding a feature or two to skyrocket it to uber-success?

Now that we've taken the poll of a small Twitter (and FriendFeed!) audience, we thought it would be good to take the pulse of a wider audience that includes our decided readers here on RWW. We hope that you'll not only answer the poll, but share your overall thoughts in the comments - be them here or on FriendFeed. We support both.

On Moopz, the social media flow is categorized into three main areas: recently active conversations, popular conversations, and quiet conversations. Upon login (you authenticate with your FriendFeed remote key), you'll see the recently active conversations listed on the homepage. On the right side of the homepage in the sidebar, the currently popular conversations are listed at the top and the quiet conversations are listed at the bottom. In the middle of the sidebar is a tag cloud. Each item that comes across FriendFeed is semantically tagged based on its content and those tags are displayed in proportion to the number of stories they represent. (The biggest tag so far? "FriendFeed" of course).

How Moopz Reduces FriendFeed's Noise

However, what's truly innovative and unique about Moopz is the way in consolidates the distributed activity across all of FriendFeed. One of my personal biggest pet peeves about FriendFeed is that the biggest conversations seem to only take place in the top users' streams. Those conversations might take place about an article a lesser-known blogger wrote, but because these FriendFeed super-users have more fans, the conversation will surround their sharing of the article via Google Reader instead of the blog post shared by the small-time blogger.

And if you are the blogger and aren't savvy enough (or just too busy) to track the numerous shares of the article, then you miss out on hearing the conversation taking place. Some people have unfortunately framed this problem as a desire to "own" the conversation, but that couldn't be more wrong. It's a desire to be a part of the conversation no matter where it's happening. There was a time when that conversation happened almost entirely on the blog itself. That's no longer the case.

In any event, by consolidating the stream of noise, Moopz also democratizes FriendFeed conversations. On FriendFeed, popular items are shared by multiple people and conversations then arise around those items. Moopz aggregates those conversations and "likes" into a single combined thread. This also helps eliminate the problem of duplicates on FriendFeed - all the multiple sharings are consolidated be them bookmarks, Google Reader shares, tweets, etc.

A FriendFeed-Flavored Techmeme

This actually makes Moopz the "fair" version of Techmeme. While Techmeme is an amazing service that lets you keep up with the hottest news, its headlines are often from the A-List. On Moopz though, any item from any site can become a popular item - all that matters is that it has the most FriendFeed activity. Also, when you're viewing the page for a popular article, the first few sentences of the article are extracted, which encourages people to actually click through and read the article instead of blindly liking or commenting.

A Story on Moopz

Moopz is definitely a great new way to interact with FriendFeed - it doesn't have to take the place of using FriendFeed itself, but we think several of you will agree: this is FriendFeed done right. 

Disclosure: Mark Carey does ongoing consulting work for ReadWriteWeb. However note that Moopz is an independent product and RWW has no affiliation with it.

The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need.

There are many ways you can roughly cut down on the noise in your information stream. More emerge all the time and this is a very valuable direction for services to be exploring. We don't want to argue that noise is always good, it's clearly important to spend some time without it every day.

The most recent entry into the noise filtering scene is probably FriendFeed's new "best of" feature. Late last night FriendFeed rolled out the ability to view just the items most popular with your friends on the service for the last day, week or month. It's something many people have been hoping for and there's no doubt it will prove useful. If you're not using FriendFeed yet, you can check it out and add me as a friend if you like here.

Other services that are good for filtering out noise are del.icio.us popular for a particular tag, AideRSS and Google Reader's overly friendly shared items from friends feature. We'd love to read about your favorite noise filtering tools in comments below.

On the Beauty of Noise

Filtering isn't everything it's cracked up to be, though, and you wouldn't want to live in a fully filtered world all the time. Social media noise is an essential part of learning and living on the web. Hear are some reasons why.

Unexpected opportunities.

Some people call it "serendipity," others call it "passive and opportunistic information acquisition." (Erdelez, see below.) The less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for.

Scanning quickly over large quantities of roughly relevant information can turn up invaluable resources, opportunities, context and contacts that you can passively process or opportunistically leverage at will.

Future Needs

It's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. Who can't remember doing that before?

The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. A person with a substantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.

Maximizing Recall

Some people worry that being exposed to too much information will lead to not remembering very much of it. Scientists say that's not necessarily the case, though. Sanda Erdelez, for example, wrote the following in her study Information Encountering: It's More Than Just Bumping into Information

A majority of participants in my information encountering study, when asked about their past experiences of "bumping into information," were familiar with the notion of accidental discovery of information and could recall these experiences clearly.

We may be afraid that we won't remember key information that rushed past us in a river of news, but Erdelez argues that when prompted about a particular incident of accidental discovery our memories are better than we might think.

We would argue here in fact that the more total information our minds are exposed to, the more particular items we'll be able to recall in the future. One useful strategy may be to spend some time going through a large amount of information just a touch more quickly than we're comfortable with.

General Knowledge

Beyond simple recall of particular information in the past, internalized noise can be just as useful in the formation of wisdom and perspective as introspection, thoughtfulness and other forms of attentiveness can be. Spend some time skimming, it'll make you a better person. You'll meet new people, learn new things - don't worry, it's fun.

Personal Growth

Serendipitous search in the offline world is believed to be one of the ways our understanding of the world expands. David Pescovitz at BoingBoing writes about Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson's PhD thesis titled Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects:

"Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable," Ottoson argues "materialize in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach."

That's more than just a beautiful reason you should read BoingBoing, it's an interesting understanding of the way that swimming through noise helps us become who we are.

Conclusion

Quiet time, time off-line, deep thoughts and long books are all beautiful things - essential to a healthy intellectual, psychological and social life. We argue, though, that the opposite of all those things - online social media noise, is also a great opportunity that deserves to have its worth recognized at a time in history when many of us are struggling to deal with it.

So take some time for yourself when you can, find a nice place to sit with a cup of tea and blow through a few hundred items in your RSS reader. If you can relax into it, it'll help you remember some of the reasons why you love the internet.

Creative Commons photos, Christmas 2007 series, by Flickr user Kevin Dooley.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_online_noise_is_good_for_y.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_online_noise_is_good_for_y.php Analysis Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:46:55 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick