Popularized by Twitter, the public micro-messaging medium is leading to a major evolution of the web and society.
Twitter is just the beginning of this real-time internet – the simplest manifestation of this long term trend – that spells the end of communications and start of an interaction society. ~ Om Malik, What Twitter and Broadband Mean to Me.
The public micro-message medium represents the potential for a 4 billion person global message board, where anyone can share their interests, ideas, and actions real-time, and where every message can be seen, referenced, and responded to by anyone directly, person to person. This is nothing short of monumental.
What’s more is that people love it. It’s easy to do, nothing more than typing a short message, and can be done from anywhere via computer or mobile phone. This makes it real.
The result is streams of succinct, interest-driven messages that create relevant, real-time context around every account, topic, and object they reference… which effectively means anything and everything. With that comes an increasing expectation that the web will orient itself around each person, topic, or object based on it’s history and real-time context. Already for me, I follow fewer blogs, spend less time in any single site, and instead find more of what’s interesting to me coming to me through real-time messages from the people and topical threads I follow. This reorientation is what is changing the web.
To me it’s clear that we are entering into the biggest transformation of the use and form of the web since it’s creation. This is not an incremental improvement but rather a fundamental evolution that requires a whole new set of applications, services and ways of interacting.
Cool. So now what? For me, there are 2 things. First, for the real-time web to reach its full potential we need a neutral, platform-independent application infrastructure and public dataset. Second, this will be the fastest evolution we’ve ever encountered and with that comes an unprecedented opportunity to seed a whole new wave game-changing ventures.
A neutral, platform-independent application infrastructure and public dataset.
Anyone who has built something on the Twitter API knows of the challenges and limitations. Processing real-time public micro-messaging data is a big challenge and one that is only going to get harder as more people and more services publish public micro-messages. This challenge could seriously stunt the growth of the real-time web and lead to a fractured future. What it calls for instead is a neutral, platform-independent foundation that hosts and provides the real-time dataset and a robust and reliable application infrastructure to build upon. Such an approach is also more compatible with the essence of the real-time web which is fundamentally a public resource created by people for public consumption. This is what we are working on through SVC.
Seeding a whole new wave of game-changing ventures.
It’s just beginning. Betaworks investments for example shape an early ecosystem of some of the most relevant ventures in this area and Collecta and maybe Ginx are two ventures that I think are getting right to the core of the real-time web. It’s also never been easier to launch a web service and with new application infrastructures it will only get easier. The key challenge, aside from the infrastructure issue, is being first to market with applications that work with how the real-time web really works. I expect development, capital, and management talent are going to flock to the opportunity. Giving those resources a jump-start with proven prototypes of services that layer community and collaboration into the real-time web is a huge opportunity. This is what we’re working on through Shouldless Inc.
There’s never been a better time to start something and never been a better opportunity to change the game. Exciting times to say the least. Game on!
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Creating a solution that cuts across platforms is critical.
The current slate of micro-messaging applications and platforms is just the start; many more websites and social networks will create micro-messaging applications. Combining information and conversations across silos will be ciritical to creating real context / relevance; creating ways to combine #hashtags from across the web is a tremendous opportunity.
The realtime web will force us to change how to consume information.
We're stretching 1) the technology behind the communication systems we created and 2) the human potential for processing and understanding information. Breaking points are powerful stimuli for innovation 🙂
Our ability to understand and experience has yet to catch up with our ability to create. I'm not kidding; developing better ways to experience and use the realtime web is key to developing “personal APIs”.
But that's just theory and questions; looking forward to solutions and answers…
Sometimes, I wish we can pin down these beautiful ideas into simple applications so that we can move forward. That is one of the reasons why I penned the post on the stuff that I like to experiment.
If we take the ideas discussed here and build some simple services based on these ideas, what would you build?
Well, we are working on the application infrastructure and also on a service to layer community on top of a curated real-time web. I'm also hoping that Taylor and I can get some time next week to document a process for 'scaling doing' that he mentioned on his blog (taylor – can you pop the link into the comments). It's something we are effectively trying to do in Shouldless.
Actually thinking now that your last line is backwards – the 'Personal API' is key to developing better ways to experience and use the realtime web. It needs to revolve around us in real-time.
Backwards, forwards; chicken and the egg; they need each other…
Aaron actually left an interesting comment on a different post on my other site (talk about fractured conversations) about the realtime web revolving around events: what does the realtime web revolve around?
link to Aaron's comment: http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/04/1…
Backtype could help this :-).
I think the realtime web will revolve around the both subject and observer based on the 'history of realtime' for both of those things. In my mind that 'history of realtime' leads to the 'personalised API' for people, subjects and objects. That 'history of realtime' comes from the contextual threads around those things and their intersection with other threads. Feeling the need to #vizthink this to try and explain. Maybe someone can help with that :-). @ryancoleman… @ryancoleman?
This is a good example of why we need hashtags across services. Being able to pull in the necessary expertise that you think will contribute to discussions by simply adding a @ tag. I think such a service will definitely encourage more conversations, rather than publishing.
In your mind, how difficult it is to build this? Maybe starting with comment systems and Twitter.
What's hard is the scalabilty. Working on it.
I'd be happy to donate a highly scalable and extremely flexible PHP based REST API. Uses almost any database, memcached and PHP 5. It's flexible enough to return the data (resources) in almost any format; XML, JSON, HTML, PHP serialized, AMF, CSV, even text-to-speech as an MP3. You can easily create new resources and response adapters to support new applications.
Travis Collins
DreamingWell.com
Thanks for the offer… I'll pass it on.
I'd be happy to donate a highly scalable and extremely flexible PHP based REST API. Uses almost any database, memcached and PHP 5. It's flexible enough to return the data (resources) in almost any format; XML, JSON, HTML, PHP serialized, AMF, CSV, even text-to-speech as an MP3. You can easily create new resources and response adapters to support new applications.
Travis Collins
DreamingWell.com
Thanks for the offer… I'll pass it on.