Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.
This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.
What does this mean for how we will come to consume information? John Borthwick from Betaworks has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity (Betaworks portfolio companies include Twitter, bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat, and Tumblr). He admits he and other investors are still feeling in the dark, but he describes the shift he is trying to capitalize on this way in a post titled “Distribution . . . now”:
First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages.
In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.
A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.
In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed. No wonder AOL is sticking the stream in every part of its service, from its homepage to Bebo to AIM. (Yahoo is grappling with the emergence of the stream as well, but so far still thinks it can hold onto its place as a central traffic and distribution hub).
The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:
Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.
Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.
The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:
This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.
So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.
(More stream reading: Nova Spivack and Om Malik. Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)
All we need now is a Google Index stream and all other streams will become obsolete.
its a ocean not a stream. whom ever puts a luxury boat liner network to give people and businesses premium refuge and to filter the nonsense may just be on to something.
WaterFilterLocator.com – rinse yourself
if it’s an “ocean not a stream”, should i register oceanstream.com ?
lol, too late DONE! jk
Its good to see the internet moving to real time…If Googlel should do more to become more real as well…
how about “donkeylocator.com”
Stream will increase unique visitors, as people come to see whats new out there. But similar thing can happen with a page that updates, like a wikipedia page or updated profile page.
But quality of page will remain the king. And people lose interest in stream if the linked pages in the stream are consistently low on quality.
Anything with the word “locator” has been registered by him for his very good idea. Except that it isn’t a good idea and he probably hasn’t registered them all. But, if he did, then perhaps the most appropriate URL would be:
dumbasslocator.com — how to waste all your money
Perhaps world is moving too fast.We never know how fast it can be in future..same goes with google
Yeah. Most of us are probably growing up in a world of instant gratification – information is delivered so quickly to us at the click of a button. It’s good in a way – the efficiency. But at the same time, we seem to want more and more of it that we often lose our patience when things aren’t delivered to us instantaneously (look at what happens when Twitter experiences some downtime…).
lol! This is so true!!!
Google can be the giant machine that is indexing all pages on the Internet, but that is about it. The pioneers of the streamlining content are the media. The reason is simple: they compete with one another to be the first in spreading the news. As a news reader, you also want to be the first to get the news that is important for your business.
Since many streams (but not all) have corresponding feeds (RSS or Atom), you can have your page with streams, and quite easily. Why not have it all?
Stream a conversation surrounding a topic on your website or blog using this: http://www.blas...ur-website.aspx
We’ve seen a blogger write about something and then include this widget after the post to show related conversation, without requiring users to comment directly in response to the post. That way the embedded stream includes a broader range of thoughts and opinions.
I think we’re going to run into another problem soon. With the ability to know about many things at any given time, what are you going to do about it?
Many people are becoming obsessed with the latest news, link, activity, etc. Thats all great, but I doubt most of us actually do anything with all the information we are hit with. We want to know, for the sake of knowing…
There are tons of things I would love to be updated on, but odds are none of that information will change my day in any way… other than stealing my time.
I wrote a post addressing this recently:
http://bit.ly/EYJOL
Hey guys, don’t forget to check out our latest release: a twitter – like site that lets you say what you are doing using the combination of text, photos and videos. Check it out. http://www.twibeo.com
Great article. How long till we’re all walking around with head mounted cameras?
Yes yes yes!
Great post Erick.
I continuously evaluate the web under the consideration of how it will impact consumer brands. So this comment is a tangent to your post. The shift you describe will present brands with significant opportunities to inject their message into the stream and form real one-on-one relationships with consumers–relationships that have previously been owned by retailers.
That said, by-and-large these large brands are fundamentally flawed in their organizational structure. They cannot effectively provide relevant information and meaningful dialog because they have relied on the corporate press release and the retailer for so long.
I agree with David, “Yes yes yes!”
Thanks for the great article / anlysis of the Stream Erick.
I definitely concur, with both the article and David’s reply. I am constantly following and scouring the internet for the latest emerging technologies, and in reading more and more about the Stream and it’s impact on the modern web, I get the same feeling as I did when reading about Facebook and other social platforms in the pre-web 2.0 era.
I genuinely believe the technology behind the Stream is the future, and will rewrite the rules and directly impact the way not only ebusiness but people in general interact and communicate with one another. It is a major step forward towards the complete adoption of another rapidly emerging technology; the Cloud.
I am an interactive Flash developer, and the technology behind the Cloud and the Stream will open the doors and usher in a new era of interactive marketing and communication. The flexibility and reach of the Flash platform, when combined with support for streaming/real-time cloud-based information, will create (and is creating) the new standards on how to reach customers.
I for one am ecstatic to see this change. It’s the dawn of a long-awaited return to consumer-based marketing, in which the goal of trying to gain customers is fused with adding that personal touch that makes people feel good inside. If you haven’t read the book “hug your customers” by Jack Mitchell, I would highly recommend it, because the principles and the many possibilities in which companies can “hug” their customers is fast becoming the de facto standard in modern age marketing.
I would love to write more but I have a feeling I am going to run out of room, perhaps i’ll make a blog out of it….
Thanks for the insightful article!
- Brad
I didn’t really understand anything from your post, Brad.
It sounds all “touchy feely” but devoid of any substance.
In any case, here’s my take:-
Realtime updates (aka “the stream”) produces a LOT more noise than signal. Twitter is either banal chatter or spam with the occasional nugget of useful information. In other words, I’m wasting my precious time if I’m on Twitter for anything other than checking if a website is really down or “it’s just me”.
The real quality information is carefully crafted and published as its always been for the last 15 years – on web pages. “Nowness” is great for news and things like that, but the real commercial interests lie less in “nowness” and much more in QUALITY INFORMATION. And people use search engines to find this quality. They buy stuff by price comparing, PERUSING websites. That’s where the dollars are – in searches, not updates.
Every month some TC journo comes out with this rehashed article, but nothing really changes. Realtime networks are still full of junk – spam and chatter. The only use I have for Twitter is to check if another website is down or not.
Seriously has anyone here got a solid business plan for “the stream”. And don’t come to me with “you can network!” – I’ve been networking for 15 years online. I didn’t wait for Twitter. I was doing this with NICHE messageboards, newsgroups, email, IM, and of course my own websites from the 90s right up to today – and I convert a lot more through QUALITY interactions because we can have IN DEPTH conversations in threads (from forums), and 3rd parties reading such conversations know that *I* know my stuff.
So, enjoy your empty chatter about “the stream” – seems I’ll have less competitors as you guys concentrate on your navel gazing.
Andrew,
First off, you’re absolutely right, in re-reading my post it did seem as if I was being vaguely obscure at the point I was trying to make. Also, that very fact reiterates the first point you made – that much of the content in a data stream is actually chatter, or “noise”. However, saying that my post was ‘devoid of any substance’ implies my opinion lacked any form of fact; you could have worded that better. I could reference the line “The real quality information is carefully crafted and published as its always been for the last 15 years – on web pages.” in your reply, and say that you must think anything that someone has taken the time to write and post on their website must be quality work, and come on now, everyone knows that simply isn’t true.
You talked about the importance of carefully crafted publications, and that people peruse through search engines to find the ‘quality’ material. Again, this is true and I completely agree. However, a great deal of that information is crap, and as I just mentioned, even crap can be carefully crafted to appear is if it were genuine fact, no?
I believe you were critiquing the stream in terms of social chatter and how that could be applied to a business model. What I was referring to is the future of streaming data when being merged with cloud computing, and how that aspect will rewrite the rules of how businesses and people reach one another. That’s all.
As for your last remark, correct me if I am wrong, but I am sure the execs at big companies that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs requested financial support from (Xerox, et al.), could have borrowed your line and told them
“So, enjoy your empty chatter about “the Personal Computer” – seems I’ll have less competitors as you guys concentrate on your navel gazing.”
But we all know how that turned out.
Very eloquently stated. I agree with you 100%. I also get my REAL content from trusted professionals who earn a living sifting through all the junk and delivering the most relevant information to me. I like millions of real working professionals who have families, commitments, etc. don’t have time to ride the ’stream’ of junk for hours a day hoping to pick up something useful. Much as I like Facebook for catching up on some family and friend news, it and Twitter are mostly filled with idle chatter.
I’d rather spend 1 hour a week on ‘web pages’ from news agencies and Pro bloggers than 5 hours on Twitter, Facebook or some Social Network.
Let’s leave the scial network ’stream’ to single (maybe lonely) people looking for a relationship.
@Brad, cheers for your reply, but I disagree on some of your further points:-
I didn’t say the internet is full of quality publications/information (far from it) – I’m saying that quality information is what counts, not “nowness”. It is FAR EASIER to find this quality information through a search engine than Twitter. TC have absurdly over-hyped “nowness” as being vital. It simply isn’t unless your job requires you to hang on the news wires all day long, or you’re a stock trader or whatever (in which case you already have your “streams”).
You wrote : “What I was referring to is the future of streaming data when being merged with cloud computing, and how that aspect will rewrite the rules of how businesses and people reach one another. That’s all.”
I cannot fathom any meaning from this statement. Give me some specifics and I can at least agree or disagree with you
Finally (to quote you):-
“I am sure the execs at big companies that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs requested financial support from (Xerox, et al.), could have borrowed your line and told them
“So, enjoy your empty chatter about “the Personal Computer” – seems I’ll have less competitors as you guys concentrate on your navel gazing.”
But we all know how that turned out.”
Well, this argument technique can be applied to anything can’t it? I can say “ha! So you say Cuil will fail as a search engine?! Well look how Google turned out!” – associating a successful business model with something that is yet to be a success doesn’t make that thing a success. What makes it a success is if it has any practical business use.
I don’t see much difference between social networks today and message boards, forums and bulletin boards of the past with exception to user features and formats. Essentially, they’re the same thing. If you look at this form of user engagement/activity from past to present, social networks are shifting back to message board formats — Friendfeed for example is a lot like Makeupalley, a message board that has been around for something like 9 years.
chuurch! (it means i agree)
That’s what I was thinking the other day…
It seems like the only difference is that now you don’t have to reload the page
Sam: there are lots of other differences too:
1. Google can index these.
2. Moderation is decentralized (I can delete any item underneath my node on friendfeed).
3. Each node has a URL and is permalinkable.
4. Everything is searchable (Twitter and friendfeed have search).
5. Assholes and spammers get left out of the system because you can choose both who you follow and if you block them you reduce the attack surface area.
6. Topics are totally decentralized. In the IRC world you’d go to a specific place to talk about a specific topic. On friendfeed, for instance, the topic changes with each post.
7. You can hide topics you aren’t interested in. You can also hide people you aren’t interested in. You can also hide data types (like YouTube videos) you aren’t interested in.
There are other differences too. Oh, yeah, and everyone has a client to display friendfeed. How many people know how to setup and use an IRC client? Not many.
I’ve come to determine that when people (myself included) talk about how the new X (FriendFeed) reminds of the old Y (IRC, Usenet, BBS, etc) that it is a compliment.
Each Y was wildly popular in the groups it appealed to because it fostered a gathering, topical organization, and a form of curative management. They also became a cesspool over time in many places where those communities did not police themselves.
For me, the real time is about getting to pick from a variety of mechanisms to interact — desktop or mobile or in realtime (web) or async (email). So perhaps all of this is a way to choose in realtime more than what perception the user has of how timely the refresh, index, or the moment.
I’ve noticed 30-90 day old threads on FriendFeed pop back up again when someone stumbles by them. This is similar to the notion of a *bump* on a BBS of course. The question over time will be how many of these legacy quirks and characteristics of Y will be folded or permitted into X by those that control the back office services themselves.
Cuthrell: It is a compliment, but the only thing relevant in what Scoble said was his last sentence.
There was always ‘ignore’, ‘kick/ban’, ‘kill files’, etc. FF does do a better job at lots of things over the media you listed, but it its accessibility+real-time+archives which make it powerful (though still a time suck). Biggest complaint: usability sucks for managing and using filters (even after creation.
I still can’t tell why Usenet?IRC/BBSs were not iterated on, rather than ignored. They seem to be left for dead. No new service is discussing the influence of these precursors in the context of their product that I can see.
I like friendfeed but forums are still a great format for discussions and most forums have the features you are talking about.
Google have been able to index message boards for years. Almost all message boards are searchable as well. Threads and posts have permanent links. Most forums have the option of ignoring people.
Take forums.macrumors.com as an example, I can’t think of a better place on the internet to discuss mac related subjects, it has realtime search, it has a latest topic feed…
I agree. Total control, and not only that, but when the information will be processed so fast it’ll be viewed in a global way, like what you did and all the relations you concluded from it will be palpable over what you’re actually doing, it’ll be a great helper in information management. And RSS + us will construct our definition of our knowled
ge, in the way that we prefer, as minimal or exponential.
The mind could also prefer having a suggesting “lock”, showing the considerations of skipping into information overload, where you would be not able to define your own limits in the information received in your cloud data and mindset. All of those services will evolve to that point, so more time means more looking in the past, more user attention, more to get to again. Referencing is important, knowingly constructing and remembering with ‘backed up’ traces.
Looking at the news timeline and was impressed by the level of openings it showed me in that particular design. I was able to get to a murder on my date of birth in the newspaper of the day, with indexed scanned OCR pages in a split second, without me knowing I’d get to it, and by my interaction giving it value.
If I share, we loop it in the ‘now’, always accessible now, from the user having the time to get back. We tend to be faster in information processing than ever because of that I think. Data now is created, but also fortified from inside out everywhere.
Why only compare IRC, Mr Scrabble? Let’s compare forums.
1. Google can index these.
And they index forums.
2. Moderation is decentralized (I can delete any item underneath my node on friendfeed).
Any DECENT forum is self-policed (idiots reported). There are many fantastic online communities.
3. Each node has a URL and is permalinkable.
Forums : no problem.
4. Everything is searchable (Twitter and friendfeed have search).
Forums : no problem.
5. Assholes and spammers get left out of the system because you can choose both who you follow and if you block them you reduce the attack surface area.
Not a problem with forums that are active – I’ve seen ONE forum close in 15 years because of persistant trolling/spammers.
6. Topics are totally decentralized. In the IRC world you’d go to a specific place to talk about a specific topic. On friendfeed, for instance, the topic changes with each post.
Not sure what the benefit is here…
7. You can hide topics you aren’t interested in. You can also hide people you aren’t interested in. You can also hide data types (like YouTube videos) you aren’t interested in.
Big deal. Online, you find the niche community that interests you.
Like I say, why compare ONLY IRC? Many forums have realtime chat facilities, private messaging and public threads. Has been the case for 15+ years. Nothing new.
Yes, you have it right. The “it used to be pages, now its streams” don’t hold water. All it is is faster, with a lot more noise and filtering needed.
“the stream” = “graffitti walls” from the 1980s BBS era, now with multimedia and subscriptions. And yes, it can be indexed and viewed on mobile devices.
Interesting, but some would still say that there is still an obligation to track down every last tweet and feed if its a *close* friend. That is why services like tweetdeck with its ability to separate the streams are doing so well.
“…The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge?”
Good question.
I submit this as the answer:
http://www.flic...691/3132754199/
It all leads to information overflow. “Streams” are one more prevalent force that will make the need for real time information filters and aggregators to become ever more sophisticated. How many others out there have gone through this same cycle over and over again with RSS feed readers and other aggregators? You have a nice clean screen. You start accumulating feeds to read. Your screen overflows. You smile as you finally sit down and create categories and sub-categories for your feeds and you have a clean screen again. Then your screen overflows with categories and sub-categories. You give up.
The success of TechCrunch and other popular blogs is that a human being is acting as a filter and aggregator of information for you. Digg does the same except it uses the “wisdom of crowds” to achieve that effect. But the reality is there are still terabytes of useful information that you never see. It becomes more of a process of sipping from the fire hose whenever the overwhelm subsides long enough to let you to do it, then the intelligent mastery of the information ecosphere.
The future resides in full fledged AI agents that can not only pick out what is important to us and at the exact time we need it, but to also provide an anti-feedback mechanism that recommends items based on things we *haven’t* seen before but not in an annoying random way. It’s not only searching for information that matters, but equally vitally important is semi-guided browsing. Without the latter you get an incestuous echo chamber of information that’s lacking the vitral ingredient of discovery too. Note, the AI solutions are coming but are still several years away.
I couldn’t agree more… really how could one follow what over 1,000 people are saying on twitter, 50 blogs, 10 news websites…… really work 50 hours a week and then spend hours trying to wade through it all. It just won’t happen.
I did a video that shows how to do it here: http://www.kyte...w-i-read-tweets
I wanted to watch your video, but it says channel no longer available.
well you can follow 7000 and read 20 blogs per day then write 3 blog posts and work 10 hours … it’s all about how you organize your self!
@amous. That’s truly commendable but what about 70,000, or 700,000 (and so on)? What if at any point in time the best quote, comment, blog post for your current research or entertainment needs is in that other vast amount of the web you’re not reaching at all? Statistically the chances of that are excellent since the amount of information on the web is inconceivable.
Consider this, one of the most amazing benefits of the web is in joining minds that are working on similar topics or problem that are separated by disparate geographic locations and potentially orthogonal personalities. However, the chances of those minds discovering each other are not good because unless the current Topic Of Interest is a popular or grossly obvious one (i.e. – easy to find), there is no conduit to connect them that those minds can readily discover.
The enormous appeal (and irritant to some) of a service like Twitter is that people are essentially thinking out loud. By revealing our thoughts in a warm, voluntary manner through Twitter we start to make our very thoughts and moment to moment research quests available for comment and reply. In essence, we are allowing our thoughts and lives to be indexed and that allows minds that could cooperate to cooperate on tasks on a much finer grained manner than ever before. The smaller the size of a reusable solution, the more overall solutions it can be a component ofthat increases the number of solutions that can be created from it exponentially.
But as exciting and groundbreaking services like Twitter and others are, it is still a very crude and clumsy process compared to what is coming. Let’s take the idiom of the context sensitive menu so ubiquitous in software and web page help to the extreme; in the form of wearable computing. You walk up to someone at a party with the latest in wearable computing hardware. The camera in the barely visible headset recognizes the persons face and identifies them, and shows you your notes on them; perhaps some business notes about them as a client or, in the case of an old flame, a list of that person’s favorite poetes (hopefully you are not being unfaithful and are about to discover an intercept Trojan your wife hired an old hacker friend to plant in your system, oops!). As you talk to the person speech recogniton software picks out keywords and shows you Wikipedia page or news clippings to keep you informed on the topic of discussion. In the latter case, you might decide to woo that old flame and snippets of poetry from their favorite poets are shown to you in real time which you work into the conversation. A sort of digital Cyrano de Bergerac if you will.
I’m having some fun with this but this is all possible and even likely. The point is, without AI agents to help navigate the mind boggling amount of data on the web, and filter out only what we need, our ability to reach our true potential as thinking beings is limited by our attention span and the speed that we can read. We can do so much more and we will. Have a good weekend everyone.
*Outstanding* article Erick. This is why we read TechCrunch, for the deep-thought, big-picture essay based on a comprehensive, detailed understanding of what big players and new startups are doing. I was just making a list last week of all the problems people need solved by a stream instead of a web page. It was a fun list.
Will we ever see an ebb to this flow? The day when people start to revolt. A day when we see backlash against this constant flow/stream of information? A second coming of modern day hippies where it becomes cool to once again “Turn on, tune in, drop out”? A place-in-time when people brag about NOT having a Twitter or Facebook page?
I think there’s already a subculture against Twitter and Facebook, well for that matter technology in general.
I call them geeks.
All the cool ppl are on Twitter.
I like to know what Techcrunch, as a collection of pages and articles, thinks where to position themselves in the ’stream’?
A larger number of Likes and Comments are coming from FriendFeed here lately…
Erick,
You seem like a good guy and you write great articles for the most part.
But most of the people have to understand that Web 2.0 never had a business plan and never will have one.
Just because Yahoo, Google, AOL, eBay or whoever bought them for billions of dollars don`t make them succeed. They haven´t. Big comapies got their hands full to sell them, close them or make them profitable. Other than “connecting” friends with friends, yourself with virtual friends and connecting you into some superstars spam list it has never mattered.
Why? Because Web 2.0 and internet relationships are same like the casual one`s. They are too complicated to understand.
Publishing and newspapers are suffering because of that. Why? Because media has became some sort of a spam list full of celebrities doing awkard stuff just to promote their new album, movie, book or whatever. That is what is killing publishing – scandals, “yellow journalism” and the things that got them into the market and into the spotlight in the first place.
Internet is eventually going in the same way. There were awesome times, but now it is just turning into one big piece of shit that people want to stay away from.
Twitter, Facebook, Myspace are nothing more than another spamlists spamming you like yellow news do. That`s what killing them. That`s why they will never succeed.
We don`t need to start to filter the “information”, but we need to stop producing this spam that people take as “information”. The useless crap that most of the internet has became.
A marketing scheme so to speak.
Hopefully TechCrunch will get their act together and will stop spamming people with that shit.
There are tons of other stuff that matter. Tech in logistics or tech in medicine that saves many people every day. Stuff that matters and makes our lives easier. Stuff that has proven to be great for us and stuff that Governmets and companies are willing to rightfully pay billions of dollars. Focus on that.
I never use Twitter, Facebook, Myspace… Yet I have account at most of them to understand how they trick people’s mind.
They don’t care what they distribute or how they become distribution channels.
They develop this services to make money. That’s the goal. That’s what business all about.
Very simple. Right?
To make money, yes.
But they never have made anything spectacular.
See the difference?
Just because it’s “cool” to have hooked up your friends in virtual or just because you think that you are genius by spamming useless crap that you think will make you instant millionaire. While there are companies in medicine that earn these billions.
Do you think they spend millions of dollars in the medicine to discover new pills just because they are so fucking philanthropist and care the human life?
)
Come on!
I was talking about the equipment to discover these kinds of things. MRI etc.
Help, I fell down the rabbit hole!
MAN OH MAN, that was right on! This is all shit. The industry is having sex with its own metadata. All this social media crap is going to take a huge fall… I’ll say within 2-3 years, maybe next year. Twitter sucks, it is for kids. All of a sudden millions of people will reach the same conclusion and it’s all over in a few short days.
Social media obsession will be on the list of ways American empire failed.
I agree – there’s an awful lot of navel gazing going on and little actual substance. Follow your common sense and you can succeed online because so many people are caught in the glaring headlights of hype. Just shuffle past these people and produce a quality service or product online – you’ll find there’s less competition as people chase their own tails on Twitter or FF or wherever.
“>spreading everywhere isn’t this a typo with no link?
Dudes this is happening a lot of times these days.
Wish you crunchies would use http://www.goosegrade.com/ to cover your asses…
Disclosure: I am not paid to post this, I discovered the service by accident…
Ok, so a number of real time updates serves the ADD prone of us, but where is the real added value. The real problem lies in better, more intelligently filtered streams. And again, these horizontal services with duplicated, non-mission critical services (social nets in general, Facebook in particular) are just adult busyboxes).
The problem remains, realtime or not, to provide real gains in productivity and work / life enhancement, not just real-time for the sake of real-time.
There are so many blue collar business solutions, both desktop based and mobile apps, that were crowded out of the funding stream by duplicate, stupid, YASN YAVSS models. The solutions providers for trades /work productivity were forced to bootstrap and never got a bite at the capital that was flowing to what can only be described as “retarded venture capital”.
Real time or not, create and enable value.
Streams are great and can make websites more ’sticky’ by making people want to continuously revisit the website to see what’s new in the stream.
Dictionaries are even doing it! Here is a stream that shows newly added or coined words. http://www.elovivo.com
There are people already in this commenting about “marketing” and stuff.
When you guys realise that Internet isn`t some sort of a formula to turn your stuff into Gold?
Just because you market over the Internet or spam.
Let is go and stop thinking of it like its just another “easy” way to get money, because it never has been.
Most of the stuff on the Internet never profit.
There is a serious problem of information overload right now. In addition to this, the information for any individual is dispersed right across the Internet in many different channels (someone’s videos, pictures, musings, etc).
What we need is filtering and to give meaning to all the information, and this is where microformats and the semantic web come in.
There is a lot of value to be had in being able to organise your online activity appropriately and show it in the right form each person (whether that be all your current activity in a constantly changing stream, or a more concise summary and ways to delve in further).
This is probably the best most insightful article I have read on Techcrunch in a long time, it really got me thinking about the beast that is the web and where exactly it is heading. Although there is no doubt that the stream is where we are heading there will always remain a great need for static content and resources out there for us all to rely on. The stream is a great way of getting a snapshot of information and I agree that the biggest mistake is to try and keep up with the stream at all times as it is physically impossible, simply dip in and out as you see fit
All this seems indeed to be happening.
But is it relevant when most of the value you get from the Internet (”pages”) come from being able to find trustworthy, persitent, precise pieces of information, or to communicate directly with people who will deliver that precise piece of information?
Basically what I get from what you are saying is that we are going to see more and more of the nonsense we already see in crowd phenomena in real life, only faster and with larger crowds thanks to the fact that it’s online. Call it progress, huh?
Dip With a Strategy {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/Pfp8AXqM6G_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Dip With a Strategy ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/s0r7SHOEos”}}}
I used twitter search yesterday to find an answer about a google product – google’s search is increasingly my second choice after realtime search (summize etc)
Most people will never have the time or inclination to follow realtime streams, but they do provide a great resource for anyone who wants to keep others informed. One application for this is drip marketing. This involves gathering items that would be most useful for your potential or current clients and delivering them as regular FYI emails. I just wrote a post the other day on doing drip marketing with Google Alerts:
http://www.aler...-google-alerts/
The same procedure can be applied to a Twitter search stream.
All the valuable information streams regardless of whether they are news, blogs, microblogs, or podcasts can be conveniently found at feedmil.com
cls: I absolutely agree with your post. I must say your post was way better then Eric’s article. Way to go!
Wasif: Try “reply.”
“The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them.”
That is the most sensible statement on TechCrunch this year. Facebook led is in this direction and Twitter took it to the next level. I am glad youcan see that Twitter will NOT replace RSS as Gilmor suggests but enhance and influence it.
All that being said, being able to navigate the stream without drowning is the next challenge on our hands. the man that solves it will become the hero!
http://getonepage.com
Interesting article.
But what about merging PURE DATA with text and news updates?
What if candles on a level 2 chart of an OTC stock are showing a bottom bell curve trend, and at the same time a news story comes out saying that they just got a new multimillion dollar contract, and at the same time people are posting on Google groups for that stock saying they just bought X shares, and what if at the very same hour an OTC mailing list released a hot pick on the same stock and OTC penny stock sites also have that one as a top pick, and what if this happened simultaneously????
Shouldn’t that all be automated?
Why the hell should we have to do our own research?
Stocks are just an example. Couldn’t we merge live data in with news and text updates in an algorithm.
Believe it or not, I am working on this for one of my projects.
what I mean to say is, shouldn’t live data and updates that people release be merged into one stream intelligently?
People don’t necessarily care about what others say, they want the summary data. This data should be pulled from many places and put together intelligently.
Right?
btw, when I finish my OTC intelligence tool, I will never release it ever to the public, so please don’t ask.
If you had a real perpetual motion machine, you wouldn’t give it away.
Chris said…
Stocks are just an example. Couldn’t we merge live data in with news and text updates in an algorithm.
Chris, this domain of financial datastream update and analytics will become available soon. This is called high-frequency-finance. There are lots of researches in this area over recent years with many publications been made by computational finance researchers. The best book on the subject is:
Introduction High Frequency Finance
written by Prof. Michel Dacorogna.
High frequency financial stream analytics is the next wave of new applications in computational finance.
Falafulu,
If you are still working on your project, and need free ticker data, you may want to consider this.
http://code.goo....html#Positions
you create a portfolio with 1 share of every single OTC stock then run twitter style API updates to get all the info in XML.
This type of market info as a feed is usually $200 a month and up. Google made it painfully difficult to extract real time ticker info out of the service, but if you’re crafty, you can manage.
I am still working on mine with PHP. I used IMAP and a gmail account to pull all the mailing list data with regular expressions.
Chris,
Check out the Bloomberg Terminal and Reuters 3000 Xtra. Been doing exactly what you describe for over a decade.
These tools are a decade old. Intelligence now lies in OTC mailing lists, on Google groups, and in RSS feeds.
You are talking about technology that traditional analysts use.
I am talking about a genesis machine that provides UNIQUE and ACCURATE leads with intelligence that nobody can buy.
Priceless intelligence.
If you had this tech or were close to building it for OTC, PINK or even NYSE, but with NYSE you lose the volatility that would make the biggest use of it.
At any rate, if you had this intelligence, and you made it publicly available, then you would officially be the biggest sucker on earth.
That would be like giving away the Delorian in back to the future to the public on the internet.
NO FSCKING WAY.
Yes I am building this. No I will never ever, ever, ever share it ever.
Sorry, I misspelled Delorean.
Why include Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop in that list of players in the stream? They’re just leeches on Facebook and Twitter, don’t see them as transformative by any means.
Wow, Talking about the internet changing to Live Streaming puts goose bumps on my arms, DealitLive.com just launched Live Video Auctions, just like eBay or Amazon but with Live Video feed, so yes Live Video streaming is definitely the future.
Check out DealitLive.com, the first site that lets sellers Create there own personal selling channel and lets them do re-runs(re-list) of there shows if the product didn’t sell and most importantly lets Consumers and the Sellers interact Live via Chat tool bar as the Seller’s are selling there products.
I tried forever to get some business partners to adapt their strategy to this area. I felt at the time it was the ‘next big thing’ – and still feel that way. so congrats to whoever’s site this is. It should do very well (though I’m not fond of the name).
Streaming or live updating will be the standard in a few years, once the technology adapts.
While I agree with the development of a streaming nowness, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the development of new models of providing or consuming information doesn’t mean that we no longer want or need older models.
Though it is delivered differently, we all still want to listen to music. Television, or at least audio-visual media is still huge. Written word, blogs, twitter, etc, remains gigantic. It’s moving around. We’re accessing it in different ways while doing different activities.
Obviously, I love technology and the changes it is bringing about… and this post is spot on in identifying a change either taking place or that has just taken place — depending on where you are in the vanguard.
thats why economy sink – all the stream
Twitter, fb, ff – don’t have time to get to work
There always is somthing intersting that
we can’t resists !
Our ability to create tools that will filter the noise for each one of us arising out of this constant stream and focus on the message that is relevant to us will be the key to this future.
Hi Harnish.I am agree with your views.
There’s a big assumption that the general public will accept the real time web. RSS barely caught on, and based on the current folks populating Friendfeed, I don’t see there being a reason or need for the average web surfer to use the service (since they don’t use that many outlets to stream in the first place.) There’s going to come a breaking point to all of this.
Erick, handful of comments. First and foremost thank you — a lot of stuff to think about here — lots of thoughtful ideas and comments. The clips you selected from the original post (http://bit.ly/qqz6w) are interesting. I’m intrigued that you drop the history stuff, you and Henry both! Re: our investment strategy — not sure I’m rationalizing — already fully committed! — using these posts, the medium, to think out loud about these shifts. You also raise the speed of change. Thats a part of the equation that im fascinated by, thanks for highlighting it — the shift is happening really fast, as if people were waiting for it, the stream is starting to rage. I saw some data a long time back suggesting that YouTube rose to prominence in less than 90 days — thats when the video share-shift happened. Shift happens real fast today.
Todd. I like the Gelernterlizer, and the name! — need to think about the dimensions. http://www.flic...691/3132754199/
Robert Oschler: I dont think I agree. People are becoming filters and helping others manage and cull the streams. AI agents have been coming soon for while — I think agents might well start to intercept and augment the stream and help filter it, but people, humans are the primary filter. AI agents aside your point about the echo chamber is important. At times the streams seems to converge and amplify the same stuff again and again. Different points of view, the edge /the tail need to integrated into the stream. The bit.ly data I posted – the length of the tail of URL’s is very telling data, imo.
Harnish: Agree. “Our ability to create tools that will filter the noise for each one of us arising out of this constant stream and focus on the message that is relevant to us will be the key to this future.”
lots to think about here, thank you.
I guess I dropped the history stuff because I am more interested in the now
You covered a lot more ground than I did in your original post. I just wanted to zero in on a few high-level ideas that really resonated with me.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while. Thanks for helping me sharpen my thinking, John.
@john,
“People are becoming filters and helping others manage and cull the streams. AI agents have been coming soon for while — I think agents might well start to intercept and augment the stream and help filter it, but people, humans are the primary filter.”
I’m not sure we disagree still. That is the purpose I see for humans since we are the only participant in the process that cares about the results. Computer don’t. Also, humans are the only thinking “machine” that can intuit what another human cares about, that’s why as much as we love the Web it’s still easier to consult a human expert (assuming they are competent). To ask a question you freqently need to already know half the answer.
However, that does not downplay the enormous importance of a capable AI agent. I know legions of my fellow techies, especially my fellow programmers, that feel exhausted trying to keep up with the latest technical innovations, changes in industry specifications, new scientific discoveries and more. And trying to keep that information handy in a manner that is easily retrievable at the corret moment is nearly impossible. Worse, that exhaustion murders the time spent in fun creativity while processing the information into new forms for sharing.
Sure discovery is fun, but in the case of the Web it’s like an ant eating a bowling ball. It’s too big to eat. However, when talking about these things I have run into a wall with some people who don’t like the idea of being driven instead of driving. Perhaps you think I’m saying that the AI agent would end up doing the driving? Obviously when you start to allow another entity to choose the information you see there’s a risk of seeing the world through blinders or a distorted lens. But that’s why I made the emphasis on semi-guided browsing being an equally significant half of the solution, not just assisted information culling and selection. Without continual fresh discovery of information that is geometricaly diverse from what look at all day long, we will indeed lose our sense of perspective and could becomes slaves to the filter instead of beneficiaries. In the end, I’m a firm believer in what Isaac Asimov said about technology isolating us: “We’re monkey folk, we need to gather” (sic)
Did a post here – http://www.tear...l-time-streams/.
Also, re filtering and parsing. Check out http://www.seriouslywine.com for an example of filtering the wine category. There are links at the bottom of the page to other topics. This is still experimental, but I think selection and classification are 2 must have technologies in the world that is emerging.
test
Erick,
Your posts are just like all the other posts on TechCrunch. Except yours don’t suck.
The elephant in the room is the lack of strong real-time analytical system that will make drinking from the firehose worthwhile. This is not just a trivial matter of someone slapping together a software platform, there are difficult computer science problems that have to be addressed first. Otherwise, we will end up in much the same place we are with geospatial where we can collect the raw data but cannot usefully manage or analyze it except in trivial cases.
It is great that all this data is available in real-time, but that lack of real-time data before was hiding the fact that complex analysis and derivative products are not produced in anything resembling real-time.
@andrew,
Agreed. I think looking at what nature does is always at least a decent way to start analyzing a problem. The human brian has neurons that form larger secondary processing centers, and those centers form feature detectors, and the feature detectors feed classification modules, and so on. The web is in the process of evolving a higher level structure too. I don’t want to go “all Sci-Fi” and say it’s forming a mind or anything else that brings in all kinds of connotations that involve intense philosophical discussions. But I think most will agree that when things connect, they form more complicated structures and that process repeats recursively upwards towards larger and more complex geometries.
Things move so fast right now that one or two decades, especially in the tech world, feels like ancient history. But based on thousands of years of human history we’ve just tripped over the starting line in the race to a more advanced whay of communicating and interacting, when it comes to the Web. It wasn’t too long ago that Web services, photo sharing web sites, even blogs were yet to be discovered. How anybody could look at the surging tsunami of innovation all around us and believe that even more intense and powerful digital idioms aren’t racing into existence even as we type our TechCrunch replies is beyond me.
Actually it isn’t. In fact it’s an illusion I use myself to calm myself late at night when yet again I’ve exhausted myself trying to sip from the fire hose of the Web. But what I choose to believe to console myself when the accelerating rate of change is more than even a hardcore tech junkie can stand is just that and has nothing to do with reality. The Future the Sci-Fi writers dreamed about for hundreds of years is finally coming. It figures it would show up right about when the global economy took a nosedive. That kind of poetic irony on such a massive scale only happens in the real world.
OT, but slightly on: A friend has a great song called “Jump In” (second song down) http://www.mysp...ckitcitywriters – that would go nicely with this post.
Hell, yeah, the future is now. I blogged about this in my RSS feed 15 years ago. Follow me now on titter @multiplerealities.
Most people who have families and jobs and who don’t need to monitor the Internet in real time don’t. The number of Twitter users is still relatively small, because for most it is just a stream of random stuff.
The idea that you can jump in and jump out whenever it suits you means that all the stuff you don’t see is non-essential. So when people realize that they don’t need to monitor it and it’s just a time drain, they aren’t going to.
And if the key is to have a filter that finds the good stuff and you don’t need to monitor in the real time, then you’ve got an extension of what’s out there now — searches that are timely and comprehensive, but don’t force you to absorb it in real time.
I think people want convenience and relevance far more than they want real time info.
I agree with Suzanne. Web streams are streams of data without significance unless you have a net which can pull out that which is useful to you and that which you trust.
Suzanne, yours is the comment of the thread for me.
If I can sum this up: it’s better to get right-up-to-the-minute information ON DEMAND than it is to get it constantly in real time. We check in, get our info (on demand), check out. Like when we check email. We don’t need a POP3 device on our wrist that constantly pings our mailboxes.
So what’s the value of the stream other than news and gossip? If I want to know if website X has posted a new blog entry, well my RSS feed tells me this, but in any case, I don’t REALLY need to see it the second it’s published.
It seems it’s only tech journos who want “the next big thing” to talk about because they simply cannot find other interesting things to discuss.
This kind of loopy daydream passing as tech journalism helped bring about the last dot-com bubble.
My brain hurts just thinking about the dumbness of the article. Furthermore, the dreamy, stoned tone of it offends and scares me.
Snap out of it man!
This comment is purely to show not going to the actual website to comment is readily palpable…
We have to remember that the Web is a two way real time highway and not a one way stream.
Therefore the stream will have (and already has) a major impact on collaboration processes. We will move from text and voice based real time collaboration towards visual and tangible collaboration spaces (virtual touch tables and white boards, conference rooms with web cams) where teams and perhaps 1000 of people will be able to work together in real time.
This will for real change the concept of user driven innovation, collaborative visual design processes – and of course how brands are broadcasted to the masses and how the masses can return their responses to the brands.
Why does TC continue to mention Qik when its clearly not the best of the live-streaming video services/sites. Bambuser and Flixwagon have better streaming and you dont have to wait for the buffering, plus the overall quality is better. Qik is partnering with Brightcove and you should see some announcement soon but I dont know how much help that would do. I just want TC to really compare the services…
A very timely view of how we get access information. As folks become increasing overwhelmed with the amount of content available, this is an excellent approach to introduce and help them manage it all.
Great post Erick.
I went to the article website and noted three references to "drowning". Yet, here I sit on my happy email inner tube raft electing to only interact in this particular channel of FriendFeed now. This is an email I’m composing. I don’t have to deal with the website regulars, the Facebook posting spammers, the trolls, the people complaining this is "just another Twitter article". Nope. I can just sit here in my decidedly luddite email client and tap tap tap away. I like the way I can be realtime on my own time. Come on in. The water is fine.
Totally agree with Erick. The big challenge in my opinion to choose the right channel to bring information too. In my opinion every bit of information should have its own channel and the users should be able to select that channel. Some information is better on websites other in streams, an email or a text message. We tried this idea on investment news letting our user select the news they want to receive and in what channel they want to receive it in. Our webpage (marketdrums.com) is therefore just a place to go to change your information need not to read any of the news.
Cheer
Streams will change our lives: http://bit.ly/Wg0gH
Its a page, Its a CLOUD, no its stream, its the ocean, its a firehose. I like the firehose description best.
Wow, just scroll back 6 months and it wasn’t streams, everything was cloud. IT industry has lost touch with value added product, production in general. But it will be forced to regain its senses when it all comes tumbling down, tweets and all.
To paraphrase Marcus Aurelius (and to some extent RP Feynman) “of each thing ask was is it in itself [and not what it's called]“.
Agree – this is just navel gazing. Those who are proponents of the “cloud” or “stream” (or whatever “new thing”) never mention an actual business model. They don’t like making money? That’s fine – I’m cool with that. It takes all sorts. Me, I’m enjoying making my money by providing a quality service.