Filed under: Blogging, Web services, web 2.0
Is "Real-Time" taking the place of "Web 2.0" on the hypechart?
Is just me, or is "real-time" the replacement term for "Web 2.0": you know, hideously over-used, over-hyped and prime for a square on the Internet Bullsh*t Bingo card? I mean, word has it that every man, dog and Venture Capitalist is on the real-time train now that mere mortals like parents are embracing Twitter. Continuing the real-time push is Pubsubhubbub - the real-time blog notification technology with a name that 95% of the Internet struggle to pronounce on first reading - and today it received another boost from Typepad who've enabled the technology on all their hosted blogs.
If you're wondering "what does this mean for me?", it's worth noting that Pubshubhubbub isn't something that consumers in general would see - it's designed to speed up the propagation of news to RSS services and the like - though if you're looking forward to the even-quicker delivery of illiterately-captioned cat photos to Google Reader, this is the magic sauce that may well power it.
It's not that I'm opposed to real-time notifications in general [I mean, I'm dying for Twitter to flick the switch and stream updates from my friends doing their laundry to my iPhone] but in an age where we're seemingly drawn to 'first' instead of 'better' with the news, I can't help but feel we ought to be looking at relevancy, not real-time.
[Original Image from Dave Winer]
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Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Sam Jordan said 7:20PM on 9-14-2009
"In an age where we're seemingly drawn to 'first' instead of 'better' with the news, I can't help but feel we ought to looking at relevancy, not real-time".
That's a great quote, and spot on. While Twitter is useful for immediate notification, newsrooms are still vital for proper, sourced journalism.
Awesome post.
(I think you missed a 'be' after 'looking').
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Peter said 9:07PM on 9-14-2009
Absolutely. And 99.9% of the immediate notifications don't need to be immediate. Would it make any difference if you read a tweet 15 minutes later? I would bet it wouldn't make much difference if you read most of them 2 days later.
If something is really that important, there are better ways to get the word out quickly. Just because social media is new and trendy doesn't make it the best tool for every job.
Nik Fletcher said 2:37AM on 9-15-2009
Thanks Sam! I've corrected the last sentence also :)
michas_pi said 7:54PM on 9-14-2009
To paraphrase Neil Postman, real news is drowning is a sea of irrelevance.
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3tear said 10:05PM on 9-14-2009
I thought Pubsubhubbub was a new flavour of bubblegum.
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Juliette Moorer said 5:53AM on 9-15-2009
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Juliette Moorer said 5:53AM on 9-15-2009
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Apfelgluck said 9:14AM on 9-15-2009
I think there is a great deal of ego involved in real-time passion. A sort of hysteria for being the first in a non-stop race for information. So I do feel as well that we ought to be looking at relevancy, not real-time. Real-time is the stage, relevancy is the back-stage. Why do I always have the feeling that most twitters yell or cry?
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kingkool68 said 10:10AM on 9-15-2009
Real-time is easy and more fun to work on while relevancy is harder. Programmers like to do fun things before the hard things hence a surge in real-time technologies. Once we reach true real-time we can then buckle down and take a crack at relevancy.
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dominicneagle said 11:31AM on 9-15-2009
Relevancy AND real-time would be nice.
Then again, Google News does a fair job of keeping things (semi) real-time but also relevant - if your news ite isn't worthy of being regularly crawled (by which I mean multiple times a day) then the chances are there'll be nothing worth reading on there.
On the other hand, if your news stories appear on Google News within the hour, then your site is considered to be popular (probably because of it's relevancy) and so your news stories will appear in SERPs rather quickly.
Perhaps you just can't have both though...
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Will said 12:10PM on 10-07-2009
I don't think its quite fair to equate real-time and Web 2.0. While programmers might be overly enthusiastic about adding a real-time function to their service, its still an adjective with a rigid definition we can all agree on. Ask anyone to define real-time, and I bet you they could give a pretty good description. Ask the average person (or rather, the average internet user) what Web 2.0 means, and you'll probably get something like "Uhhh, it has Ajax. And rounded corners. Also shiny things and drop shadows" which of course does not adequately describe what Web 2.0 means on and to the internet. This of course allows for more hype, because people can copy a small feature of Web 2.0 that adds nothing to their content and say they've gone Web 2.0. When you make your content real-time, you can claim with 100% justification that your content is now real-time, and after a very short 'hey look this is cool' period, we can start discussing whether or not real-time added anything to the content.
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