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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]
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsSam JordanSep 14th 2009 7:20PM
"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').
PeterSep 14th 2009 9:07PM
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 FletcherSep 15th 2009 2:37AM
Thanks Sam! I've corrected the last sentence also :)
michas_piSep 14th 2009 7:54PM
To paraphrase Neil Postman, real news is drowning is a sea of irrelevance.
3tearSep 14th 2009 10:05PM
I thought Pubsubhubbub was a new flavour of bubblegum.
Juliette MoorerSep 15th 2009 5:53AM
I agree with this blog.Nice writing,we enjoyed to read it.
ApfelgluckSep 15th 2009 9:14AM
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?
kingkool68Sep 15th 2009 10:10AM
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.
dominicneagleSep 15th 2009 11:31AM
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...
WillOct 7th 2009 12:10PM
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.