Why I wrote about a reasonable time Web
I haven’t been writing as much about technology in recent months as I have previously. I’m more interested in the brains, thoughts, ideas and feelings behind these things, to be honest. Yesterday I wrote about the concept of a reasonable time Web, which doesn’t rely upon instant updates or “real-time” information. I thought I’d add a bit more to this topic to try to clarify my thinking a bit more.
When people talk about technology, newer trends and innovations are popular discussion fodder. We talk about “shiny new toys” or the “latest thing”: technology which looks interesting, exciting, and sexy. Change always creates buzz (people talking about the change, of course) and buzz captures eyeballs (i.e. the attention of readers).
One of the warmer (OK, hot) topics in technology writing is the idea of a real time Web. In this environment, information is transmitted to the Web at large in very short periods of time: seconds or split-seconds is an ideal amount of time between transmission and availability of information. Twitter is the poster child of a real time Web which gives us that speed of information delivery. Of course, as soon as you make a change to a Web page or update a website, those changes are instantly available to the viewing public. HOWEVER, it’s useless to make a change that is instantly valuable unless:
- people are waiting expectantly for the change and refreshing their web browser every few seconds to see if something new is available
- people get a rapid notification that something new is out there for you to see
RSS (Real Simple Syndication) technology is, in many ways, a reliable and efficient means to get notification about new content on Web pages (for example, you can subscribe to this blog within a RSS reader so that you don’t have to keep checking this website directly to see if I have new blog posts; the RSS reader becomes efficient if there are lots of blogs that you want to stay on top of).
I think you can be creative, a smart thinker, and a good problem solver without needing instant updates about the news. The real time Web wouldn’t be particularly useful for finding old, useful information unless there are people who specialize in going through digital archives and sharing the best.
The implicit advantage of a real time Web is that you can monitor the right people at the right time in the hopes that they share something useful for you when you need it. Automated feeds could also handle the same need, I suppose.
No doubt that a real time Web is useful, but it can’t do everything, either.
Do you agree? Why not leave a comment and discuss?
Ian M Rountree:
I wonder if there would be a use for some form of API set to handle notifications of these kinds? Twitter's nice and all, but you're right – I stopped machinegun page refreshes months ago when switched to TweetDeck. Still, in part because of my exposure to Twitter and my personal reliance on IM clients (five on my BlackBerry alone), speed of delivery is a big deal – but ONLY when matched by appropriate notification. I still can't convince WordPress for BB to let me know when there are new comments – nor is there a Disq.us application.
I think centralised notification could bridge a lot of the gap between the things we need to be real-time, and the things we need to be closer to email-time. RSS does a good job of this from its direction, but not every aspect of a website or community is RSS-able.
6 December 2009, 12:00 amMark Dykeman:
You know, you bring up an excellent point about blog comments that I hadn't considered. However, blog comments do trigger E-Mail notifications, which are generally quite fast. Maybe that's sufficient?
6 December 2009, 4:41 amIan M Rountree:
In a lot of cases it may be. But I set up a skip-inbox filter for comments a long time ago, when receiving 38 Disqus notices at once from a single thread caused my phone to apoplexy and cry uncle (crash). I still check them, but the process feels like an app, rather than emails now, which is actually a bit more enjoyable. You know, for me.
6 December 2009, 7:49 amMark Dykeman:
Ah. I don't use cell phones for mobile computing and I don't have a PDA, so those are some things that I didn't consider. It's all good knowledge.
6 December 2009, 10:36 amMichael Kozakewich:
I'm wondering how push notifications will change things. Instead of relying on intermittent polling, protocols like PubSubHubbub will allow applications to quickly receive messages without all the overhead of constant polling. I imagine Twitter could then rescale the API limits, because the vast amount of users would just be receiving a tweet or two every couple minutes, instead of requesting zero tweets every thirty seconds.
Once server-push technologies mature, the entire web could become real-time. I think we'll need more ways to sort that flood of information; email and texts just aren't adequate.
15 December 2009, 9:45 amMaybe a Twitter-like feed of all texts, emails, tweets, posts, and comments that you're following?
Mark Dykeman:
I'd never considered push vs pull before; it makes the current Web a bit more understandable to me now. Man, that would be a big change.
16 December 2009, 4:04 am