Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernova’s Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).
Andrew thinks that real time streams such as Twitter are overwhelming and not very helpful for normal people yet. He pulled out the old canard that real time media will never replace traditional media or trusted Websites. I countered that kind of misses the point. The stream—be it Twiter, Facebook, or what have you—is simply a vehicle for directing attention elsewhere via short links and commenting on what is happening now. Those short links usually take you back to regular Websites or news articles, or even documents from years ago which all of a sudden are relevant once again. In that way, even events that happened long ago can be brought into the real time stream. It is like pulling an experience from deep memory and reliving it.
The argument veered into the philosophical (Keen challenged me to explain the difference between consciousness and memory), but fortunately we didn’t get too far down that path before wiser minds stepped in. Before I knew it investor John Borthwick from betaworks and Kevin Marks (who just joined BT from Google) were on the line schooling both Keen and me.
Erick — you’ve had three hours now to remember difference between memory and consciousness. Definitions please.
Consciousness is knowing that you are, memory is knowing that you were.
Things like twitter are great, but they won’t ever replace traditional media unless we get to a point where they’re not filled with inane crap and spam. Traditional media is moderated which ensures some level of consistency, any one can say “Britney spears is dead” but newspapers and the like are trusted to verify because they have a reputation to maintain, any one can say she’s dead via twitter and there doesn’t have to be an ounce of truth, if we trusted this we end up in a sticky situation.
@andrew – The stream—be it Twiter, Facebook, or what have you—is simply a vehicle for directing attention elsewhere via short links and commenting on what is happening now.
I totally agreed with the article, websites such as twitter are mostly useful as a source of information (real time or not). In order to get very concise information the traditional perhaps non- real time website are going to be playing major roles in years to come.
Great conversation which far surpassed the 140 character limit and I didn’t consume it in “real-time”.
Thanks, both Erick and Andrew for continuing a great conversation that is evolving on the web.
Kevin Marks is my hero.
I really think Andrew Keen is an idiot, I dont know why this guy is talked about, I am not going to even argue back what he said its retarded. He just wants some attention I guess he is good at that.
No peace negotiations? From what I read that’s the newest thing in fraud life http://tr.im/vQ3A after the fraud book and the fraud tour, the fraud peace.
i wasn’t there for this but seems to me the distinction would be between recollection and memory, insofar as recollection is a conscious act, and consciousness, being habit, is always both an act of remembering and forgetting… but that’s spitting hairs. glad to hear that wiser minds prevailed.
realtime web capability does not need to replace anything in order to make itself useful. people have needs to share some information in realtime and other information in non-realtime setting. the big deal at the moment is that the web now enables everyone to communicate in realtime at almost no cost. as real time data like twitter conversations are streaming on the web, new services are born from it. some of these services will become killer apps.
Most people talk about information sharing and searching on realtime web. I’d like to add reatime analysis to the hot list for watching. as an example, my open project at http://web2express.org does semantic analysis of twitter streaming data in realtime and enables everyone to follow any topic. there are many other similar open and free services coming up as a result of realtime data streams becoming available.
What I’m concerned about is real-time’s exigencies rapidly devolve into a perceived “need” to endlessly rewrite the now and hence rewrite history.
On Google’s Wave, you can reach in to another’s email and rewrite it; you can rewrite something you sent; you have interactivity up the wazoo.
Oh, sure, there’s a “history” page you can go back to refer to, in order to track changes. But who will do that for every single thing? It’s like Winston Smith’s job in 1984.
I’m coming to this 48 hours later, so I’m probably way too late for any real-time relevance. Still, I think something like what AJ Chen mentions is going to have to be part of the solution, but I don’t know that it’s going to be enough on its own. The fallacy is that we have to choose either the blurtstream or the old, static web, edited (rather than curated) by humans. If the two quit fighting one another, they can work together in mutually beneficial ways.
And Erick, aren’t you making Andrew’s point for him when you highlight the value of tweets as pointers back to more substantial content? And you back him up again when you choose specific people to follow, trusting their human judgment to pick out the tasty bits from the steam of fluff? What exactly are the two of you disagreeing about again?
Those thoughts are spelled out a bit more in the post at the ‘Website’ URL, if you’ll forgive a bit of self-linking.