We’re here at the second TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, where we’ll be taking a deeper dive into realtime technology and where the streams are taking us. Kicking off the event is a conversation with Twitter COO Dick Costolo. And we’ll have much more real-time goodness coming your way throughout the day (see the agenda below). Watch the live stream of the event, powered by Ustream, here! → Read More
If you believe the noise emanating from the retweetsphere, this realtime thing is something we don’t need, don’t want, destroys our sense of normalcy, prevents real thought from emerging, is populated by charlatans and idiots with more time than sense on their hands, and besides it causes seizures.
I went to Scoble’s blog on the recommendation of some retweet and found myself watching a realtime updating Twitter list of Tech Smart Guys or something of that nature. Scoble evidently has spent considerable time compiling these lists, running into limits like 500 geniuses on any one list. There are problems with lists, I’ve heard, but none more pronounced than the question of why one would like to produce multiple Twitter home pages to navigate between when the Home page is already useless.
I’ve certainly read numerous explanations of why lists get around the Follow problem by allowing you to create imaginary follow lists (hat tip to the late great FriendFeed’s imaginary friends concept.) Indeed, without Track all Follows are imaginary in that you are stuck waiting around for people to randomly say something interesting on a freakin’ Web page. These are the same Web pages we ran away from when RSS gave us the opportunity to request updates of blog posts when they were published.
But RSS has no social metadata to speak of, and no business model to keep the pipeline flowing. And if RSS detractors are to be believed, the technology never got significant adoption anyway. In fact, RSS scraped the cream of the attentionrati off the top of the Web page model and forced publishers into a race for space in a diminishing window of consumption time. Thus micro-messages were invented as a hybrid of the 10-second spot and texting crowd. Besides, most RSS posts wrapped 1 or 2 seconds of information in a stream of self-promotion — like this one. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.
The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.
The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.
The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.
Of course, my perspective is the true correct one, that the iPhone will continue to dominate as Android devices demolish RIM, partner virtually with Windows Mobile over the Silverlight bridge to carve up the volume play, and batter the telecoms into submission so that Apple can ride through the big gaping hole and launch the iBook. A great conversation that will continue.
Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.
STEVE GILLMOR: Will there be a Silverlight Office, something like that?
BOB MUGLIA: What I think you’ll see over time is major parts of Microsoft applications beginning to incorporate Silverlight into their experience. I mean, as — if you look at, for example, the Web companions that Office is doing, they do use Silverlight in a variety of instances. So, we’re seeing that being used there. We’ll begin to see Bing and MSN and our online properties begin to adopt Silverlight inside the set of things that they do. We already see some of that in a limited form in Windows Live.
If you look at my business, which is less consumer-focused, and we focus really on business customers, we are building interfaces that are Web-based interfaces for our business servers, using Silverlight. I mean, it’s become pretty universal that the kind of experience we can provide, in this case, a system administrator, is much, much better, we can write it much faster, by using Silverlight. And as we begin to launch new services — we have a management service we’ll be launching next year that’s System Center Online, that enables people to manage desktops through a cloud-based service — the entire user interface for that, from a management perspective, is all done in Silverlight.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJwHOsoXEQ&hl=en&fs=1&] → Read More
For years we’ve been told the key to the future is the Open Web. And for years it’s been true that taking the open path eventually pays off. You can’t deny the power of open technologies to disrupt the incumbents, whether they are operating systems or carriers or the media in general. Arguing about what constitutes open can be entertaining, but in a world where realtime dominates, we are starting to move on to capture the value of open for ourselves, in the private Web. As social media clouds become more resilient, we are trusting them more. Twitter lists are a robust signal that the company has moved from keeping up to encoding the value of its network. We won’t see many new stars as lists proliferate, but rather a better sense of how to model the new media forms that micromessages enable. Boiled down to vertical niches, lists are the instantiation of a way of looking at the Web, a kind of Yahoo 2.0 based on people aggregation rather than sites or topics. But what value do these lists have in raw form? It feels like a Wikipedia page, where you learn not to click on hyperlinked words for fear of getting lost in ever-cascading tangents based on ever-more generic topics. Instead, you rely on the intelligence of whoever constructed the page, scanning for clues as to authority, serendipity, social characteristics worth capturing for yourself. Two problems: the list architecture is splayed all over the place, and we have no tools for harvesting the value. Of course, we’re just seconds away from the onslaught of third party takes on the subject. Surely we’ll see interesting aggregations of the Top 100, the best, brightest, sexiest, etc. We’ll recognize the familiar names and ratify their positions in the new marketplace. It’s a marketplace that will have its own hierarchy, its own Oprah, its own politicians, police, and underworld. And with all that will emerge its own underground economy. What is the Private Web? It’s the private place only we know about (or think we do.) It’s the place where our deepest fears and instincts combine to produce the hunches that drive our lives. As a parent of a teenager, I’ve seen my hunches evolve to reflect the rapid pace of social media and my daughter’s use of it. Twitter is nowhere on her radar, Facebook serves as a gas station where → Read More
Ever since our first Realtime Crunchup last July, the momentum behind realtime streams just keeps getting stronger. Which is why TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I are putting together another Realtime Crunchup on November 20 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (the price is $395 until the final week when they will go up to $495—there are only 500 available).
The one-day event will take place in San Francisco’s fabulous new Intercontinental Hotel. The agenda is still coming together (hey, they don’t call it realtime for nothing). But I am pleased to announce some phenomenal speakers who will be joining us. Many of the members of our Realtime Board will appear on stage, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, FriendFeed founder (now Facebook exec) Paul Buchheit, Microsoft’s FUSE Labs chief Lili Cheng, and angel investor Ron Conway. Twitter COO Dick Costolo will also sit down with me for a conversation about the transition from RSS to Realtime, among other subjects. → Read More
I spent this week at John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Partly because MG SIegler was on fire, doing a hybrid live blogging/news analysis stream that let me mine the hallway conversation, and mostly because John Battelle poured a ton of research and preparation into a relentless pursuit of the “story” — namely Twitter. John asked the questions we all wanted asked, leaving plenty of time to relax and enjoy the moment when the Big Guys finally showed their cards. We’ll soon see how well these cards are being played, but for now the one fundamental fact is that, as with Noah, there are two of everything. Twitter and Facebook. Google and Microsoft. Scoble and Scoble (the one at the top of the thread and the one at the bottom.) This is very important because it undercuts the rationale for throwing FUD at the BigCos by turning us all into Missouri. If there are two locked trunks (varying degrees perhaps or not, doesn’t matter) then we can make up our minds for ourselves. The result: a valid user contract. The reason a valid user contract is important is that it shifts the argument from who’s doing what to whom to what are we agreeing to do with our data. We may have argued over the value of Track on an individual basis, but this week’s announcements underline its value in aggregate. The hostility over the embargo of realtime search eased when FriendFeed opened things back up with realtime conversation; now the Facebook acquisition is being used to restart the notion of exclusion. But it has much less force once we notice that, just as with the Fail Whale, FriendFeed will continue until it morphs into a Facebook hybrid. We will continue to have a choice, and will validate those, preferably two, who continue to scratch the aggregate itch. Viewed through the lense of the power of two, big memes like scalability and market force take on a different hue. What does it matter to me how good Windows 7 is in the abstract, as a revenue splash for Microsoft or as a funding mechanism for whatever the company is trying to do in the WebOS era? Not a lot, but certainly much less than in the context of OS/X, WebKit, iPhone, Android, etc. In context, Windows 7 drives the motion of the two forward. → Read More
I went to a birthday party this weekend where I ran into a Facebook guy, a smart guy who asked me to go off the record. In fact, the whole party was supposed to be off the record. So I ignored the off the record part by insisting that I already knew the thing I was being told, and then I told him on the record what I thought was about to happen for Facebook. This being my usual m.o. which is to insist on not being NDAed except for things I don’t really want to talk about anyway, like the next version of Office. That way, I can just make up what I want to have happen, never breaking any confidence and yet at the same time painting as plausible picture of assumed reality that it is hard to deny or in fact slow down. So here’s what I told the Facebook guy: the company has at most 3 months window to absorb FriendFeed and open the Everyone News Feed, and if that’s true (again, making all this up) then the messaging about how that’s going to work must begin immediately, like in two weeks. Then I went home and saw MG Siegler’s post and Scoble’s remake of Frenzy on FriendFeed. OK, so I was off by two weeks. The noise about the death of FriendFeed is already off the charts, and the proof is in the lack of rejoinder from the FriendFeed team. As in: of course FriendFeed is not dead, and here’s what we’re going to do to remake Facebook in the next few weeks. Actually, that is indeed the message from Twitter, what with Lists and ReTweets and the return of Track just as soon as, well, sometime next year or so. No need for FriendFeed real soon now, because these Lists will soon be carved up and meshed together into an authority stream by the 3rd party developers. Siegler nails the one provable negative about FriendFeed Facebook edition which is the lack of any innovation moving forward. The one thing the FriendFeeders didn’t get in under the wire before the money arrived was stream splicing, the ability to mesh together lists into an authority stream. Is that coming soon from Twitter either? Nope. So the antidote to FriendFeed stasis is Twitter right up until stream splicing is enabled… by who? As of right now, that → Read More
In June, I spent several days on the Microsoft campus talking with Microsoft executives about the impact of realtime and the emerging era of cloud computing. My conversation with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began with a discussion of the recently unveiled Google Wave, now being rolled out for testing by some 100,000 users. Ozzie followed up on his Churchill Club chat, where he described Google as taking on such a hard problem that it might limit adoption:
RAY OZZIE: But what I really meant was that, if they haven’t said that they’re taking on the goal to replace e-mail and IM, then what I said was irrelevant. Like the notion of taking on e-mail and IM means that you have to have a simple protocol, because there’s going to be lots of implementations of them. If that’s not your goal, you can build as complicated system as you want. But if you’re going to do something that is going to be that ubiquitous and that timeless, it’s just got to be a lot more nuggets (of that size ?) –
STEVE GILLMOR: There’s a conflict between them opening it at some point and their stated use case from the beginning.
RAY OZZIE: I mean, when you work through all where they’ve got Google IDs federated, when you look at the UI and how the actual scenarios would actually pan out, the level of complexity on the back-end to get all of that to actually work so it’s easy of the UI, it’s just hard. We barely can get people to use sender ID on e-mail to validate things.
STEVE GILLMOR: Trying to figure out how to be able to go up higher in a conversation and inject yourself, and then see what swarms around that is interesting, but it sort of devalues everything that’s below it. So, there are social cues that you’re sending by doing that kind of thing. I don’t think they have any idea where that’s going to go, and that’s going to take a lot.
RAY OZZIE: Whenever you innovate like that, you don’t know what you don’t know in a lot of dimensions. And like I said, I applaud innovation. I really like that in terms of experimentation. But when you do that, I just know from the Groove experience most recently, from the Notes experience before that, when you create something that people don’t know what it is, when they can’t describe it exactly, and you have to teach them, it’s hard. → Read More
Google Wave is roiling the collaboration space as it moves out of the sandbox and into a wider beta. The ripples are being felt by vendors ranging from IBM to Cisco and even Google itself. IBM is challenging Google Apps with an iNotes offering undercutting on price (as well as features, as Google quickly points out.) Cisco is buying small business videoconferencing assets to bolster its Telepresence technology at the high end, and jettisoning IBM Sametime in favor of its WebEx tools. While Google and many analysts see the iNotes move as a direct challenge to Gmail’s recent instability, the likelier motivation for IBM is Microsoft’s inroads with its Exchange Online product. Redmond may be months away from rolling out Azure, but the on-demand versions of Exchange, Shaepoint, and then Office Web Apps are going to hurt IBM where it counts. Why not attack the weaker target in Google’s consumer/corporate hybrid product to change the subject, Big Blue figures. Meanwhile Wave continues to make people nervous about where email is going anyway. Wave remains a relatively siloed project inside Google, with its realtime constructs more on the bleeding edge than practical solutions for the problem of managing the growing information stream. Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed signaled the power of the micromessaging trend, and attacks on Wave’s experimental UI and metaphor belie the extent to which email is threatened. Since Twitter went mainstream in the last year, micromessaging threads have become the main carrier of realtime news. Trending topics may seem the fundamental index, but information at the actionable level is carried in a smaller stream managed largely by retweets and overlapping follow clouds. A cascading series of Likes in the Friendfeed/Facebook nomenclature is far more efficient than other mechanisms, including email newsletters and RSS syndication. This new brand of news is more CNBC than MSNBC. It’s based on a “what’s in it for me” dynamic, which prioritizes the flow based on business implications first, followed by political and social impact. The Letterman story spread on Twitter and Friendfeed once the show aired on the East Coast, giving viewers the heads up to tune in to the show on the Pacific run. The morning shows ran with it as the lead. The underlying reason for the position at the top of the news cycle: the potential impact on Letterman’s contract at a time when Leno’s move to primetime has changed viewing → Read More
Today’s Gmail outage illustrates just how tolerant the new realtime architecture is to individual service failure. The initial surprise at the comprehensive nature of the flatlining may have caused some significant degree of marketing damage, my bet is that the end result will be a boost to the service’s popularity, and with it, realtime services including Twitter and FriendFeed. For my part, moving over to FriendFeed direct messaging and private groups immediately took the outage offline for the work I was doing. The fact that traffic slowed dramatically on Gmail (IMAP and POP were still up) meant there was little to miss or catch up on. My iPhone let me know that I was missing very little, and FriendFeed aggregated both the Twitter flow that documented the extent of the outage as well as the message and blog traffic that explained the outage’s contours. Within minutes it became clear how little I now depend on email in general. TechCrunch’s internal traffic is over Yammer, and FriendFeed’s realtime chat function has already scooped up most of the collaborative chatter. In recent weeks we’ve been readying a service to be released alongside the return of live video streaming of the Gillmor Gang, and the development team switched over to private groups (what used to be called rooms) a few days ago. Email continues to be a valuable source of one-to-one messaging in near realtime, but the collaborative filtering of social graph-based alerts is slowly but surely taking over from RSS readers. Taken from a 10-thousand foot view provided by the outage, Gmail becomes a critical service that can be patched around with just a few key services, nailing up direct messaging and private groups configured to send email alerts of the resultant rerouted messages back to email when the outage is over. After 5 minutes or so, the problem went away from an operational perspective. Twitter outages have been more disruptive for their impact on information flow, and Google has learned valuable lessons which will reduce the likelihood of the current event significantly. We didn’t dodge a bullet as much as catch it in our teeth. → Read More
The best news in years for Microsoft just hit the wires. Remember way back when Microsoft was under the threat of a breakup in the anti-trust days? Bill Gates famously pointed out Microsoft had no such thing as a monopoly, because (this was pre-Google) some company could come along at any moment and change the dynamics of the environment. Soon he was proven exactly correct, as Google emerged with a browser-based Ajax-fueled broadband-harnessed realtime platform. Once this platform produced advertising network effects, the upstart company had all the ingredients to mount an attack on the inevitability of Microsoft. But what most saw as a direct attack on Microsoft actually produced more pain for other players. While Microsoft used the time to advance strongly in the enterprise server market, Sun lost control of its hardware leverage as Google built its realtime monetization engine on top of Linux. Apple used the same window to move from its niche hardware and OS platforms to Intel and OS/10, grabbing the leadership in the mobile market and transferring its application base to a browser plus services approach. Did this harm Microsoft? Not really — it gave Redmond an OS target to compete against rather than against itself, and the time to migrate to a Web-based OS strategy that will show its current evolution this Friday with the release of Silverlight 3. So now comes Chrome OS and what makes you think this puts any real hurt on Microsoft’s business. Mind share, media perception, even some developer erosion (although I doubt it.) Sure, the atmospherics are strong. After all, Google is in the advertising business. And although Chrome hasn’t produced real market share yet, it will start accelerating once the Mac version ships and all of us technocrats start loving on it full time. No, all of this is good news for Google. But bad news for Microsoft? Don’t think so. WHere does it impact revenue anytime soon? Nowhere except in the enterprise, where it will increase IT’s need to sell into a strong Windows channel. Google will continue to garner occasional wins for Apps, which will largely serve to promote collaboration features coming in Office 2010. And oh yes SIlverlight, with its realtime streaming architecture, integrated adserver metrics, and oh maybe, a Silverlight based social center of the new desktop, which as Marc Benioff tells me is really the new center of the network. Chrome → Read More
I’ve been filming segments with various folks in preparation for TechCrunch’s Realtime Stream CrunchUp this coming Friday. One of these conversations took place last Thursday in the wake of FriendFeed’s announcement of what they call Realtime Search and what I call the return of Track. Paul Buchheit and his co-founder Bret Taylor have been on numerous editions of the Gillmor Gang talking about FriendFeed’s adventures in realtime, and since Bret will represent the startup at Friday’s event, I filmed Paul. There’s always been a lot of pushback about the significance of Track, just as there used to be similar downplaying or pigeonholing about other transformative technologies such as RSS. In particular, Track started as an afterthought by a Twitter engineer that he coded in just a few hours. It was used initially by SMS fans to keep track of incoming messages of interest on cell phones, a reasonable proposition in the early days when Twitter’s flow was emergent and the dynamics of major news events still outside the scope of the service. But for some of us who never really “got” Twitter until its social cloud started becoming more useful than other services, Track became the only way to interact in realtime when messages came in from points unknown. This quality of serendipity or discovery, combined with a realtime IM feed that allowed upstream messages in the same window, significantly expanded Twitter from a one to many broadcast service to a communications service rivaling not only the host IM service I used (GTalk) but also email and the remnants of collaboration tools built out around the Y2K period. This capability was both shortlived and politically charged, highlighting as it did the tenuous nature of the relationship between Twitter and its third party developers. As stability collapsed, Twitter kept stripping out all but the core functionality, and both Track and IM fell by the wayside. Over time, it became clear that Twitter’s crown jewels were in fact Track and access to the full firehose of messages. Attempts to revive Track by independent developers were rate limited to the point where the roundtrip communications aspect was effectively locked out. It could be (and is) argued that Twitter has now brought Track back via various API services, including at least three levels of flow. Some third party services have even been given access to the full stream, but that access is based on → Read More
With the Gillmor Gang shut down, I’ve been shifting my attention to the Realtime Stream CrunchUp Eric Schonfeld and I are hosting July 10 at the Fox Theater in Redwood City. Growing interest from startups, bigcos, open standards developers, and investors augurs for a valuable event. I hope you’ll join us. Some of the areas we expect to see explored include, obviously, Twitter, its ecosystem of third party developers and products, and the reactions of and interactions with other social media platforms. Facebook’s namespace rollout of the past few days is just one of the ripple effects of Twitter’s surge. Others include FriendFeed’s realtime services, live video streaming and low cost digital production, Google’s Wave project, smartphone platform strategies, Robert Scoble’s Building 43 community, and the battle for control of the center of the Web OS desktop. Stringing these technologies and brands together highlights both how early and how late we are in this cycle of renewed innovation. Just a few short months ago, we were debating if Twitter would survive, whether Facebook would open up, why Google and Microsoft would see realtime as anything more than a distraction, and the eternal where’s the money. Today, the answers to those questions are clear: Yes, As quickly as possible, Because they have no other real competition than each other, and Right where it’s always been — the enterprise. With Oracle swallowing Sun, the enterprise dynamics have swung hard to right, past cloud computing, and directly into the mobile identity landrush. It’s easy to pigeonhole smart phones as the latest version of Studio 54 society politics, but in fact our identities are being consolidated around the SIM chip, with our social graph around the Follow/Track architecture of Twitter and its subsidiaries. Today the switching costs from device to device are substantial, but Apple’s aggressive deployment of the iPhone and AppStore application divide are doing to the carriers what widgets did to Yahoo. The razor blades are winning, gaining ground, and inexorably blacktopping the differences between service plans, mobile browsing, location-based services, and social graph (affinity) marketing. It’s a language the carriers understand: revenue per user divided by cost of customer acquisition. Feature comparisons between devices are not the defining metric for where the market will flow. Neither are broadband buildout, developer lock-in, or any other measure of value — except realtime elasticity. If you look at realtime access as the most valuable → Read More
I was hoping to get down to the 140 Twitter conference today in Mountain View, but FriendFeed proved too efficient at carving up today’s developments in realtime. Robert Scoble’s live microblogging suggests Twitter is feeling the heat from Facebook and FriendFeed, but the Track report was murky, with no chance of rain anytime soon. Track is coming back, but not from Twitter anytime soon. It’s coming from FriendFeed, and it’s coming in weeks not months. Track is realtime search of the present, not the past, and FriendFeed has most of the ingredients already in place. You can monitor the flow of various users (essentially the Group function Twitter has been talking about and various clients have been providing) in a realtime flow. A new AIR-based notification service acts in concert with the main flow, allowing you to monitor incoming while moving back in time to catch up. FriendFeed’s realtime search already provides immediate filtering around keywords, but because it’s not yet realtime in display it doesn’t allow conversations to spring up between people outside of existing conversation threads. Once the conversation is engaged, the interface updates immediately in context, enabling the kinds of swarms that have grown around Gillmor Gang recording sessions. But finding these swarms requires an overt search or the serendipity of a Tweet. As I said, a realtime stream of such a search will be available within weeks. The next step is to enable users to effectively splice Track streams in with the main flow, or specific groups, or even multiple filters. That will come soon but not at the same time, though the two technologies are apparently proceeding on parallel tracks, pardon the expression. While some services have already delivered something similar to this, they are leveraging the Twitter search functionality along with its much larger cloud, attendant scaling issues, varying business relationships, and rate limiting. FriendFeed Track is a superset of those Twitter subservices, failing as other services do when Twitter stumbles but offering a constant realtime conversation regardless. Track solves several problems in this hybrid world of cross-cloud communications, making it irrelevant what version of @reply functionality is in place by tracking usernames as a replacement for following mass numbers of people. FriendFeed conversations encourage discovery of new participants by including anyone regardless of subscription status, and Tracking lets you discover conversations of interest outside of your existing threads. Stream splicing closes the loop → Read More
While we continue to debate the Death of RSS, another more interesting battle is taking place inside the walls of some important companies about the shape of the new realtime network. Though Google has seemed to capture the imagination of the Valley and the respect of Microsoft, it is Redmond where the impact of realtime is most sharply felt. Google’s 20 percent project has finally reached official mainstream status: Google Apps, Gmail/Chat/Reader, and its attendant Open Social constructs are sufficiently mature to garner structural attention within the search giant. Loss leaders including Android/Chrome and YouTube are about to pivot from bottomless pits to viral attention farms. YouTube in particular is poised to capture the lion’s share of realtime video as it becomes the hard drive for the Twitter DVR. How a virtualized media network transforms our usage patterns is already understood by the networks and their more aggressive forward scouts such as the New York Times. Many see this period as the death of the newspaper, but watching how the Times and Murdoch’s Journal are crushing the second tier of almost-but-not-quite national publications suggests the papers are girding for battle not with each other but with the cable networks. It may look like a collapse, but who better to compete with for the attention of news-hungry desktop and mobile users. These are the same users who’ve been fleeing RSS for Twitter in recent weeks as the message bus gets clogged with old-media marketing crud and Brittany trivia. Users still want their gossip and such, but they want it prioritized behind any significant realtime information that can help them save/keep/find revenue and outlast Depression 2.0. It’s not that RSS has suddenly stopped working; it’s just that realtime is faster, and it increasingly is using custom transports that are more socially attuned. The results of an affinity cloud increasingly trump other notification engines. With high priority signals clamoring for position at the center of the desk/phone top, those networks with pole position will push out the rest. If it’s video, it’s YouTube. For that matter, if it’s audio, it’s YouTube. Podcasts? Sorry. Streaming notified over the realtime bus. H.264 across the iPhone and Silverlight. The rest will follow. Notice for the first time I include a Microsoft pole position. Google builds the standard, Microsoft ratifies it. Microsoft must move quickly in this environment to align with winners in the message bus prioritization → Read More
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift. I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore. Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it. RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites. This disconnect drove me away from partial feeds and toward the new owners of the blogosphere — the deep information space of those feeds that respected the reader container. From NetNewsWire on the Mac to Bloglines to Google Reader, I swam in the brisk waters of the RSS river, only returning to the classic Web from links embedded in posts or email newsletters. The fulltexters won, and in the process, sowed the seeds of RSS’s decline. As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Comments were that attractor, and particularly the active threads where the readers could interact with the authors. The result: The Statusphere. And in reaction, the need for social management of the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime → Read More
Ever since Leo Laporte enabled a foldback loop on the video feed coming from his TwiT studios, the Gillmor Gang has hit a new sweet spot in the Adventures of Realtime. Prior to the foldback loop, we were still back in the Nightline days of staring blankly into the camera and pretending to see what Ted Koppel’s expression was. Harry Shearer of the Credibility Gap and more recently the Simpsons immortalized these Warholian head shots in a ground-breaking show we co-produced at Caroline’s in the Eighties. When we started recording the Gang live on Twit.TV, the only way to get a sense of the continuity was to monitor the outbound BitGravity client and its delay of somewhere between 5 and 8 seconds. It’s a lot like spacewalking in slow motion; you see expressions float by that sometimes are the opposite of what you expected. Of course, this is the same reason why Twitter’s Track feature was so valuable, and also why it was withdrawn and remains unavailable: the conversations you have in realtime have a feedback loop that produces a synthesis of collaborating minds unequaled in today’s virtual reality. Latency is the enemy of closure, the march through countervailing positions to the discovery of new people and ideas that add something to the accumulated context of the information stream. We all know the problem, manifested earliest in school classrooms where the darting hands of “pick me” reveal the next question as coming from some earlier context far removed from where the subject has moved. Twitter realtime is one way, one to many in each direction. You can point the conversation at a subject domain via hashtags, or at several users with @replies (now @mentions). But hashtags form swarms that are vulnerable to noise, with management issues slowing down realtime to the point where it’s not worth it. Track, unlike search, requires no management. Hits are pushed to you as alerts, or integrated into realtime flows if that functionality is available. Realtime critics accurately portray constant monitoring as unscalable, but we don’t sit waiting for the phone to ring in order to utilize its realtime technology. The real issue is that anyone can potentially interrupt you with a call, most commonly at dinner or at the moment when you finally negotiate a single show the whole family can watch and are running out of time before the youngest’s bedtime even if → Read More
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