Why the real-time web isn’t important

I have been thinking a bit about this notion of a real-time web. Having access to real-time information, as soon as it is published, seems to be a possible Achilles heel for Google according to some (here and here). People who say that do not understand the real strength of Google or it’s possible innovator’s dilemma. But the question that interests me is the user value question. Does it provide us value to have access to information, the moment it gets published? The answer is that it isn’t nearly as important as something else (will get to that).

I guess there are cases where this can have value. An area that comes to mind is big events. The Obama inauguration, a plane crash, earth quakes, the super bowl final.

I’ve tried to use Twitter search and Friendfeed’s real-time options, and honestly, I find the experience mediocre. A bit of nuance might be in place here as we are only discovering the first potential of such services. However, I am trying to grasp what the specific real-time component adds to the experience. And I can’t put my finger on it. I can think of a few reasons why:

1. Life doesn’t jump from one big event into the next one. When watching the Obama inauguration, seeing the Twitter community discussing and commenting it gave a sense of added value. The information added value to the experience at that moment. If I look for Obama on Twitter now I get an incredible amount of useless information. The context defines value. Currently is no context in which real-time search results on Obama now provide me much value. There are times when there is such a context, but most of the time life goes on.
2. Immediate knowledge doesn’t always add value. If there is an earthquake in San Francisco (or anywhere else for that matter) we now see Tweets reporting in within seconds. But that information is only relevant if you are in it (you didn’t need a Tweet to tell you about it), you have people you know live in that area, or you need to know it for professional reasons (e.g a reporter). The randomness of the waterfall of information getting through makes it hard to understand what is really happening out there. A recent plane crash in Amsterdam appeared within a few minutes on Twitter. It gives people a reason to discuss it (terrible tragedy) at the coffee corner, but did it really provide value? Not unless you had a relative in that plane crash.
3. Real-time information is hard to verify and trust. People are saying a lot of things on services like Twitter. Without context or understanding more about the people tweeting, it can be really difficult to understand the trustworthiness and accuracy of the information. You can already see the algorithms being drawn up that take reputation, reliability and trust into account, but this problem can’t be solved easily. Reputation, reliability and trust aren’t real -time characteristics. They take years to build. The only way these characteristics can be determined on information is for that information to be published, read, and responded to by large amounts of people. A blog post can build up trust, reputation and reliability if it has been exposed to readers, critics etc. But a tweet that appears in seconds doesn’t follow that process, no matter what the reputation of the person is that sends it out.

Does all of this means that the real-time web and search has no value. Off course not. Getting the news out fast is important, and it has caused many of he traditional media to get online to join this rat race. But in my opinion speed really isn’t the most important factor.

I do think that it becomes increasingly difficult to find information with enough relevance. There is just too much out there. Google can’t index the entire web fast enough, nor is it able to display the most relevant links in any particular situation. Aggregators, no matter what kind, tend to do a pretty poor job of aggregating relevant information timely for us (yes that includes Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit, and most of the major tech blogs). If you want to know more about that, then read this excellent post by Paul Graham who talks about his experiences with setting up and running the Hackernews community. Excellent read.

It seems we do a much better job at storing and retrieval of information that doesn’t lose value as time passes by. Encyclopedia’s, history, arts, dictionaries, etc. There are however some experiments that try to approach the problem of information organisation very differently. I’ve always been very font of the work that Jonathan Harris is doing this area. Check out his universe demo, and his “We feel fine” project. Seriously, give it a spin and then come back. I’ll hold.

Jonathan’s work proves to me that we haven’t reached the depth of possibilities to handle information. I’ve said this before, but if I were Google or anyone else interested in organising the world’s information, I would definitely get someone like Jonathan on board. His work actually makes me crave for more information. I can get lost in the universes he has created and I return frequently to dive in for some more.

The real-time web sounds cool, but right now it isn’t much more than another technical capability. I don’t really get passionate  about that. Instead I’d like to see what happens if we let non-tech people like Jonathan redefine the way we would be able to access information. I’d say we would find some more ground-breaking and relevant ways of information organisation and retrieval than the “real-time” web. I’d take this one step further and say that it isn’t relevant if published information gets indexed  and found in real-time. The only relevance we should be focusing on is getting the user the right information at the exact right time!

The question is more important than the answer

Yesterday I wrote about the trend that every bit of content that is produced on the Internet seems to get aggregated, producing yet another view of what is already out there. Instead of delivering us inspiration, aggregation brings us more of the same. Aggregation doesn’t inspire us to think, it lets us sit back and consume. I said:

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

I figured it would be good to spent another post on this topic and introduce you to a few storytellers I deeply admire. These are people that aren’t looking at their rating on any blogging leaderboard. They don’t publish for the sake of it. They don’t bring you the breaking news everyone else already does. They are, in my opinion, people that like to take the time to tell us a story. Something that is nearly always fascinating to read, and often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. They make you think, and that is the sole purpose of their act.

Jonathan Harris

If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you already know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Harris. He is one of the best storytellers I know. You can find most of his work right here. One of the projects he did that really amazed me is called Universe.

Jonathan writes:

Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

….

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Universe is a concept in which Jonathan brings back our fascination of content exploration. In the earliest times humans would look at the sky and explore the universe. With universe he has created a concept and interface that allows us to explore the world once again. Instead of sitting back and getting stuff aggregated to your screen or profile, Universe demands you to explore, to discover, to be fascinated. Each trip is different.

There is a whole lot more to discover on his site. I love his work on human emotions (check out “We feel fine”). I have seen him present his work once and ever since I have been following him. For all you Twitter fans out there. Jonathan inspired a Twitter tool that is way cooler and more fascinating than any of the tools I’m aware of. check out twistori to find out what Twitter users are experiencing right now!

Rolf Skyberg

Anyone that has the audacity to write 477 slide long presentations and can keep the audience fascinated throughout each slide is a great storyteller. I discovered Rolf when he delivered a presentation in the Netherlands entitled “Web 2.0 why we got here and what’s next”. I went back to slideshare and looked at each of his slides. Rolf wasn’t presenting us anything. He was telling us a story. He calls himself a pattern hound, and he has become one of my favorite blog writers. He doesn’t write posts every day, but when he writes something it immediately sets you to think. Just take a look at a few titles of teh posts he has written. Makes you wanna read them right away don’t they?

• the Facebook stalker and other urban myths
• why you’ll pay to network
• 98% or even 100%-open: not enough in social networks
• delivering a useful luxury

Dig into his archives and start following him. There is a lot more to be discovered there

Michael Wesch

Michael is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He and his students have created several video’s that spread out like a firestorm over the Internet. He is a master in storytelling. What can I say, just watch his video’s if you haven’t already.

Conclusion

Storytellers are essential throughout times. Even in this digital age where every bit of information is available in digital form. Where all content is aggregated for you, ready to be consumed. But information isn’t really what inspires us.

It’s a bit like Neo in the Matrix, its the question that drives us, that inspires us. I just showed you three people that inspire me. People that make me think and ask questions. People that don’t necessarily provide us with answers.

There are so many more of them out there. I am really curious to hear who is inspiring you. What are your favorite storytellers? Let me know.

Looking back at 2007 with a few lists of the best of..

It seems everyone is closing off 2007 with all different kinds of lists. I haven’t done that yet, but to make up for it, here are a few of mine:

My own 5 top posts in 2007:

1. De zin en onzin van advertenties in sociale netwerken, an article I wrote (in Dutch) for the largest and most popular Dutch blog Marketingfacts.
2. Counting down the downfall of Facebook as they set to introduce major add play
3. The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them
4. 10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction
5. Well, this was too close to call, these two posts got an equal number of visits:
   • Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail. Forget about Facebook, start innovating!
   • Following the emotions of millions of people

My top 5 blogs I like best (no particular order):

• Rolf Skyberg
• Doc Searl
• Fred Wilson
• Ze Frank
• Zephoria

These people are smart, understand social networks, business, human behavior, make me laugh, provide me inspiration. If you ask me again tomorrow, I will end up writing a different list

The top 5 video’s from 2007 I like best:

Top 5 presentations of 2007:

What are your top 5 lists for 2007?

Just a few wishes for 2008 (part 2)

In my first post in 2008 I said I would elaborate a bit about things I would like to see happen in 2008. My first wish for 2008 was to bring back freedom and responsibility to the user. The article can be found here but if you want a very short abstract, I said:

My first wish for 2008 is that Service Providers build business models on user value instead of walled garden free but ad-based business models. In doing this they should provide the user with excellent, easy to use, transparent, privacy controls where the default is always set by the standards of the user. This wish would provide us with 3 major changes: The service provider becomes a partner that can be trusted and that provides user value instead of walled gardens, the user gets his freedom, and the user becomes responsible for his own actions and data on the Internet.

I just read an article written by John Battelle that takes a similar angle. He says:

The problem is, no one seems ready to truly set the social graph free. Till now.

With one move, Facebook can change the face (sorry) of this debate by making it falling-down easy to export your social graph. And I predict that it will.

Why? Because I think in the end, Facebook will win based on the services it provides for that data. Set the data free, and it will come back to roost wherever it’s best used. And if Facebook doesn’t win that race, well, it’ll lose over time anyway. Such a move is entirely in line with the company’s nascent philosophy, and would be a massively popular move within the ouroborosphere (my name for all things Techmeme).

Compete on service, Facebook, it’s where the world is headed anyway!

Let’s move on to my next wishes for 2008.

 2. Redesign of the mobile UI and Web to make it really work for its user

I personally feel that accessing the web using my mobile sucks. The experience isn’t even close to the capabilities I have access to on a PC. I have written an article about this called “We need a revolution in mobile UI thinking”. A quote from that:

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

After I wrote that article I was asked what I felt about ovi by Nokia. It is difficult for me to really comment on that until I have actually used it, but a few things come to mind.

The thing I really dislike about it is the pay off they use, “ovi by Nokia, your door to our services”. What do you mean “our services”? My mobile phone is mine, it is my personal space, my remote control of life. I don’t want anyone to tell me what services to use. Ovi might look great, but if it isn’t truly open, forget it. I won’t be using it. I want to decide what services I access via any mobile interface. It needs an API so that anyone can build services on it.  It needs to be freed from any mobile hardware. If a mobile interface is to become successful, it better work on a lot of different handsets. Maybe Android might fill this in, but it remains to be seen. But most of all, we need to get out of the current mobile UI interface, It isn’t fit for our social communications needs.

          

(images taken from www.s60.com)

We are still using SMS, web browsing (screen too small, bandwidth/cost too high), and that darn inbox/outbox paradigm (ever tried to handle 100 or more SMSes, MMSes, e-mails  a day using that mechanism?). Old school thinking.

Microsoft just announced their version 7 of their Mobile platform. It uses a touchscreen,  like the iPhone does, as a main interface element but will also use motion gestures of the user as a UI interface element.It will be interesting to see if this will lead to better UI development, but For now I hear a lot of technological features, not user experiences. And, I still see the inbox/outbox appearing in the screen shots.

3. Human behavior as the basis for new service development

Innovation is so often triggered by technology. That is not a bad thing necessarily. Many great developments start with the application of new technologies. However, where a lot of these innovations fail is their ability to support human behavior. Technology needs to be used and needs to be useful. If it isn’t the case, then the role of human behavior hasn’t been taken in account thoroughly enough. There have been numerous new technological capabilities launched in 2007 with confusing names and propositions. Just look at a snapshot of the web 2.0 directory and tell me, which services do you know and actually use?

So often this is caused by people thinking they know what users want, but fail to simply engage with them to really understand human need. I call that observing social behavior though a fishbowl. It sounds so simple, yet is hard to do. At the same time, the reward for providing user value is very big.

The good thing about this is that it leads you away from a mediocre web business model that is currently being used in web 2.0 developments. Instead of thinking about locking in the customer, you need to think of providing him value (thus setting him free, big difference).

4. Let content exploration become an interactive adventure again

There is an enormous amount of content on the Internet. Way too much to handle. It becomes increasingly difficult to find the right content. To help us there are numerous sites that index and present the available content to us. But that doesn’t help either. If I want to find something which might interest me but I don’t  really know what it is I’m lost. I tried browsing sites like YouTube, but it doesn’t work for me. I could look at the most popular, best watched, highest rated video’s, simply browse on subject or whatever, but at the same time I feel the interface isn’t helping me to find what I want. I’m not the only one with that problem. Looking at the blogosphere there are many examples of a video traveling through many different blogs. Everyone is looking at or recommending the same cleverly launched video’s.

I think the overwhelming availability of content is one part of the problem. The rating mechanism’s every site uses is another (it helps us all look at the same things). But the third aspect of this problem is human laziness. We all want to be entertained, but we don’t really want to put in the effort to find great content. The reason for this is that it is actually quite boring to find content using the current sites and interfaces provided. The search for content needs to become an adventure again. We need to explore new worlds, and get excited by all of our personal findings. To do that, we need new ways of exploration, new interfaces to enter these large worlds.

I hope that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will be paying a lot of attention into the work of Jonathan Harris. He has shown that the exploration of content can become exiting and adventurous.

Check out his universe demo to see what I mean by that. It is a new paradigm for browsing, and it is a powerful one. While you are at it, also take a look at some of his other projects. He has done some amazing and inspiring stuff.

5.  Let the web continue to be a place for inspiration

I read a lot of blogs, surf to different sites, communicate with family, friends and even total strangers. Why? Well, for one thing, interaction is what life is about. But another way of looking at it is that it helps me to find inspiration. Inspiration in life, work, blogging, anything really. There are so many smart and creative people out there. All you need to do is take the time to look around. I posted a few inspirational sources earlier here, but it is really just a modest list.

Enough for now. What are your wishes for 2008? Let me know? It would be interesting to compile them all together.

The New York Times river flows, but whereto?

Dave Winer is doing some interesting experiments to reshuffle the New York times content into something he calls a river of information. He uses the metadata the NY times provides in its on-line HTML news and using that data he can create mashups based upon , for example, outlines or keywords. Others have experimented with it as well allowing searches such as articles on Bill Gates.

I’m not sure what problem Dave is trying to solve.  I am no expert on search or news, but I wasn’t sure what the value was of the mixup he created for me. It seems to me that Google reader does everything Dave was ging for (search on the NY times rss feed for Bill Gates and I seem to get everything they have written about Bill Gates.

I also tried using it on my mobile (As some of the commenters explained would be good), but that didn’t work out very well. Navigation is poor, but the striping of all the flashy content you don’t need on a mobile did help a bit.

The keyword version was awful to look at, but more important worse to use. I have to roll over to each number to get an outline of what is underneath. A user interface nightmare.

The total overview of what is on the New York times is interesting, but for such a large resource the overview becomes so large I need an overview of the overview.

The question that comes to my mind is what problem Dave actually tries to solve. I can’t find it on his blog post announcement. I do see a lot of comments from people in the field (techies, here, here and here for example) that really like the work and the possibilities of the technology.

Is this a technology push of a problem that doesn’t exist, or am I missing the point? Personally I believe in the river of information analogy that Anna Zelenka posted earlier. She argues that there isn’t an information overload if you are willing to accept there is so much information. Just tap into it when you have a need and don’t try to follow everything (leading to stress and overload). That is what I do with Google reader really. But there are even better ways of finding answers to questions, the best being of course simply by asking them to another human being.

We might do this the “cool” way and twitter about it, getting loads of response from other techie twitters. But, simply asking a friend or someone you know or who you suspect knows the answer works too. As it turns out, people search way better than search engines according to Oliver Parriche of Yahoo. Yahoo Answers there are already 250Mln entries by users.

But if we really want to move forward here, why not embrace the work Jonathan Harris has done with his universe project. It not only has a very intuitive interface, but also links pieces of information in a very surprising way allowing the user to truly explore the universe of information and (Re-)discover great things himself.

What do you think about it? Am I all wrong about it and is Dave onto the next invention after he came with rss? Or is this more of a new tech feature that isn’t going to attract users?

(Re-) discovering great things on the web

Tim O’Reilly wrote a nice post today on the effects of self fulfilling prophecies on social media. One of the examples he provides (read his article, it’s longer and nicer than my brief summary here) is that if everyone uses the same sources to find or publish information, the system becomes self enforcing where in the end everyone covers the same stories (the Techmeme leaderboard effect). I wrote a similar warning earlier when the Techmeme leaderboard was first announced.

His solution to this vacuum we are creating together, is to ensure that you read fresh input, input that leads to diversion. Out of the crossover of information of, for example, art and science, new things will arise. I like that idea very much. It sometimes is hard to look for things that go beyond your own knowlegde or the field you are working in. But, learning niew things only happens when you are not in your comfort zone!

I would add a few more ways of getting fresh input:

1. Get into conversations on blog posts. I’m really not interested in how many people read my posts. But I am interested in those that take the time to digest my writings and are willing to comment or add to it. I always try to respond, and also look up that person if possible. I have found some very nice and smart people I didn’t know about this way. Remember, inspiration comes from interaction.
2. Look past the “scoop” posts (take the umph-tiest scoop post on Google taking over Jaiku’s an example, you know what I mean), and see what happens in the analysis afterwards. Often, when reading through those analysis posts and the comments they get provides me with lots of smart people I want to now more about.
3. Keep track of people writing  blog posts that are numbered (great example here), and people that  scan massive amounts of blog posts to select their favorites for you. I found 2 great posts this way today.
   • Check out Anne Truit Zelenka, who writes some very smart things about the way we (should be) consuming information. Think of looking at a huge river of water flowing, you don’t want to swallow it all, but become aware of the fish below the surface. Ties in nicely with the obervations of Tim O’Reilly. I would like to point both Anne Truis Zelenka and Tim OReilly to the work of Jonathan Harris (yes, I am a fan), who has done some amazing work on structuring emotions of millions of people in a different way.

   And check out these two new video’s done by students from Kansas State University. They are essentially follow-ups on the video “The Machine is us/ing us” I wrote about earlier. Amazing how well they bring their analysis of what is going on with them in web 2.0. I like it already, as they focus on the social aspects of new technologies.
   

4. Don’t forget to meet people in real life! Nothing better than having a conversation with inspiring people, especially if they are not working in your field of expertise!

The world is full of inspiration and fascinating people. All you need to do is look past reputations, leaders, big sites, and easy scoops, and let yourself be surprised by small things, unknown people and information beyond the information bubble we are often  stuck in professionally. Get out of your comfort zone and start interacting!

Following the emotions of millions of people!

Just saw an incredible presentation of Jonathan Harris, artist and storyteller on Picnic 2007. Jonathan has done several amazing projects regarding the feelings, memories, daily activities of human beings on a global scale.  One of his great projects is called “we feel fine“. Since2 005 he scans all blog posts containing the phrase “I feel”, or “I am feeling”. He has a an excellent application that visualises all these emotions. You can select any entry you want, but also do cool things like look at the people in the age of 35 living in the USA were happy in 2007. Check it out, read what he has to say about it on his site and take your time exploring the universe he has created.

Another amazing project is called universe. Jonathan explains how a completely different browsing and searching paradigm, based upon a metaphor of the stars and constellations provides a unique, intuitive method of exploration, finding information in global news and information.Iit helps you to find your own personal mythology, based upon your own interests and curiosities.

I am truly impressed by his work, thumbs up Jonathan, that was really inspiring.

Following all the discussions on on-line advertisement, Microsoft investing heavily in Facebook, Google making loads of revenues on search based ads. Guys, take a very good look at what Jonathan has been doing. It isn’t something a social network, platform owner or advertiser would have come up with, but hey, he knows about the feelings of millions of people. He is a very smart guy, intuitively understanding something most of us haven’t. If a company with large collections of information about people, need I say more, be smart, they would hire him immediately. I know I would!