The Now Web

FriendFeed 2.0

2009-04-06T10:53:00.001-05:00

Image by Denis Collette...!!! via Flickr

The now web just got more interesting …

Friendfeed now has a more intuitive UI. Lists became filters. Direct messages were introduced …The core concepts have evolved.

The most interesting thing is the real-time update. This will probably be copied by Twitter.

Homework project: open Twitter and new friendfeed next to each other. Compare how they act. Twitter feels old and dead.

31 minutes ago - Comment - Like

jason l baptiste, J. Abdul-Qahhar, S. Charles Balazs and 23 other people liked this

Beta still not open for me yet. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

23 more comments

You might change your mind once twitscoop v2 is out, Robert... - twitscoop

twitscoop: let me know when that's out. - Robert Scoble

I love it. Everyone is complaining that friendfeed is going too fast. Welcome to my world! Now, learn to use lists!

14 minutes ago - Comment - Like

Steve Rubel, Charles Nadeau, aerobroken and 55 other people liked this

yea not sure about this.. it's basically "real time view" with a better UI - andy brudtkuhl

67 more comments

Your green aura frightens me, Mr.Grinch. - Terence Washington

As I'm one who thinks the quality of interaction went down when lists were added, being forced to make more lists doesn't seem a positive. - Todd Hoff

The new friendfeed is now up at http://friendfeed.com/?bc=1

26 minutes ago - Comment - Like

Ian Mikutel, Alp, Jordi and 82 other people liked this

woah this is fast... - Zee.

74 more comments

it shouldn't be like real time ... and the style is not good too ... - ViVaVida

what as the big fuss about? its good, but not "great"! and plenty of beta issues - like the offscreen updates shifting text you are reading "onscreen"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! @scobelizer, is there an underhanded deal going on that we don't know about... you're note usually *this* pawny about the hype! - simran

Tips for Real Time Web working on new friendfeed - http://scobleizer.com/2009...

28 minutes ago from Scobleizer: Technology,... - Comment - Like

Russ, nondual, timepilot and 9 other people liked this

This is neat and all, but the comments are still hard as f**k to read since they're #737373, I mean, c'mon! #990000 at least. Sheesh. - Enrique Gutierrez

2 more comments

I also agree with Enrique. I also don't like the text I'm reading to jump out from under me. - Howard Keziah

Creativity from feeds and Activity Streams

2009-03-16T17:50:00.001-05:00

Its pretty obvious that most folks (assume knowledge worker) are still using the web for information. Dawn Foster’s notes published as Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content at SXSW show how lots of Information Technology Knowledge workers are using the new feeding and streaming tools. Most folks while already using these tools for more than information think they are still doing information activities. The folks are lucky to be the first generation of Knowledge Traders. The new wealth is going to be real knowledge. Information is too slow in the Information Economy. What is driving this New Information Economy is a need for efficiencies. Aggregation tools helped manage the Web 2.0 information drama very well but FriendFeed probably has a better chance at making Feeds mainstream than Google Reader. Feeds haven’t delivered to consumer but have succeeded with geeks who fortunately build most information systems today. This means there are feeds everywhere. Feeds are real time like activity streams feeds. Most people’s creative activities going forward will probably originate from a feed they were reading on a service like FriendFeed. Most people’s activities going forwards will begin and live forever on activity streams and feeds. This activities are the new work. This activities will probably include all the common activities that we see in organizations today. What happens after Feeds and Aggregation. Rapid Info-consumption and sharing? Rapid discovery and creativity. Rapid Real-time Solutions and Problems?

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content at SXSW Published by Dawn on March 16, 2009

Here are my notes for this session. These are the words of the panelists (not mine) as best I could capture them (please forgive the typos).

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content

Panelists:
Marshall Kirkpatrick   VP Content Dev,   ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray   Author/Publisher,   louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera   Founder/CEO,   Techmeme
Melanie Baker   Community Mgr,   AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin   VP Business Dev,   Lijit Networks Inc

This was another full session with people packed into the aisles.

Louis: limit sources to those things that are highly relevant. Uses Google Reader as a starting point. Read fast, share fast, decide fast. Know where it goes when you share it & engage there, too. Louis beats many of the top tech blogs with startup knowledge using these techniques.

Gabe: Techmeme is powered mostly by automation to find the top tech stories. Relies mostly on links to determine newsworthiness. It also looks for clusters of news on the same topic. Helps to surface most of the good news, but he recently introduced an editing process into the mix to add / remove headline.

Melanie: AideRSS focuses on social interactions to determine the best content (links, bookmarks, comments, Twitter, etc.). Best posts show the top articles. New beta product will be more focused on content discovery.

Micah: Start with trusted sources. Read the posts plus the links. Includes Lijit to aggregate these sources. Focused on trust relationships to drill down until you find the content you need.

Marshall: “How to find the weirdest stuff on the Internet” Used Delicious, PostRank, Yahoo Pipes, and Feedburner to find the weirdest stuff. Delicious to find the content, PostRank to find the best, yahoo Pipes to splice filtered content together, and Feedburner to give people a feed of the content.

Micah: For those looking to be found online. No matter how good you are, if you don’t interact with people, no one will find you.Many products take RSS, filter it, find the interesting content, and make it easier to find. Look for the products that have a human element & are not just algorithmic (Google vs. Delicious).

Melanie: Even for the tools, those are built by people and each one does something a little different & you need multiple tools to solve a problem, so you can’t take the human side out of the equation. It’s more important to find what people are actually reading and bookmarking vs. what they are recommending.

Louis: Follows other people’s Google Reader shares. Uses FriendFreed to put people in specific lists to find the best of the day within a specific list. Finds new information that he didn’t have before.

These techniques work best for tech, politics and a few others. It only works when people link to each other, comment, etc.

Gabe: This is why he hasn’t launched any new sites for a while. The data just doesn’t exist to do a Techmeme for many other topics. He might tackle something in a more traditional business / economic / finance area, but these topics alone are too small and aggregated might be too broad, so he’s looking for the right mix.

Louis: MacBlips has a family of sites with tech and a few other topics branching out past tech / politics.

Melanie: Disagrees that it doesn’t exist outside the tech space. It’s smaller and different, but it’s still there. Religions, knitters, etc. They are harder to find.

Micah: Launching content networks grouping like-minded bloggers to aggregate content (Security Bloggers Network). There are ways to utilize the tools outside of technology bloggers. We’re too close to the technology to see what is outside of our world. Does not think that you can automate recommendations. We take recommendations from actual people that we trust.

Marshall: He creates elaborate systems to find the lists of top blogs in a topic, but sometimes forgets to just Google it to see what lists other people have created.

Melanie: The way people think and search and make lists is on a personal trust basis. Be able to scan information to find the trusted sources.

Louis: What is your goal for finding information? Do you want to be first? Find new content? Find interesting things to read? Your methods will differ depending on your goals.

Micah: How do you find the next meme. FriendFeed is a river of information. You should try to find a new blog every day to find something new. Each one should drive you deeper into new things.

Melanie: Many of us are using Twitter more to get information at the expense of our RSS readers.

Louis: People are live tweeting (it’s easier) rather than writing blog posts.

Marshall: Twitter real-time search in Google (Greasemonkey script). He also builds custom search engines to search only within a defined list of sources. He also uses a FF plugin that allows him to get a grid of places to search.

Louis: Don’t be afraid to unsubscribe and prune content.

Marshall: Prefers to oversubscribe and prioritize. Never unsubscribes, just moves things lower in priority.

Secrets

Gabe: Information overload is a problem, but if you want an audience, they don’t always have the information overload problem. You have the problem, but your readers want interesting stuff.

Louis: FriendFeed best of day (I missed part of this)

Marshall: Looking at the bookmarking history and finding the people who bookmarked them first to identify some key people who are the first people to disover content, and subscribe to them.

Melanie: Ping her to get a beta code for the new PostRank feature.

Micah: Close to releasing a way to score individuals based on influence and connections. It should be released in the next 30 days.

The world’s billionaires got poorer.

2009-03-12T06:59:00.001-05:00

The world’s billionaires got poor. As a 21st century economy of thousands of producers and unlimited choices unfolds the “old money” will find that the value of their “assets” will decrease rapidly. It’s a sharing and liking economy driven by a need to squeeze out as much of the waste of the past. The Now Web enables rapid change and feedback flows. Innovation is also as rapid because the solutions are developed and designed in real-time so there’s little waste. Its like an open source project. Only the stuff that works matters. Capital like lifestreaming wants to be alive and vibrant. That’s why the current rich are getting poorer. There were farmers who were very rich, factory owners and the information technology moguls who dominated the end of the 20th Century. The new economy is about rapid solutions and fast change, the “richest” people won’t be the folks that amass capital, but the folks that can change capital to solutions rapidly enough to be interesting. Wealth in a real-time world is measured not by what you did yesterday but by what you are doing right now!

World's Billionaires 2009

by Luisa Kroll, Matthew Miller, and Tatiana Serafin
Wednesday, March 11, 2009provided by

It's been a tough year for the richest people in the world. Last year there were 1,125 billionaires. This year there are just 793 people rich enough to make our list.

The world has become a wealth wasteland.

More from Forbes.com:
• Billionaire Bachelors and Bachelorettes
• Women Billionaires
• Celebrity Billionaires

Click here for the full list of the World's Billionaires

Like the rest of us, the richest people in the world have endured a financial disaster over the past year. Today there are 793 people on our list of the World's Billionaires, a 30% decline from a year ago.

Of the 1,125 billionaires who made last year's ranking, 373 fell off the list--355 from declining fortunes and 18 who died. There are 38 newcomers, plus three moguls who returned to the list after regaining their 10-figure fortunes. It is the first time since 2003 that the world has had a net loss in the number of billionaires.

The world's richest are also a lot poorer. Their collective net worth is $2.4 trillion, down $2 trillion from a year ago. Their average net worth fell 23% to $3 billion. The last time the average was that low was in 2003.

Bill Gates lost $18 billion but regained his title as the world's richest man. Warren Buffett, last year's No. 1, saw his fortune decline $25 billion as shares of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) fell nearly 50% in 12 months, but he still managed to slip just one spot to No. 2. Mexican telecom titan Carlos Slim Helú also lost $25 billion and dropped one spot to No. 3.

It was hard to avoid the carnage, whether you were in stocks, commodities, real estate or technology. Even people running profitable businesses were hammered by frozen credit markets, weak consumer spending or declining currencies.

The biggest loser in the world this year, by dollars, was last year's biggest gainer. India's Anil Ambani lost $32 billion--76% of his fortune--as shares of his Reliance Communications, Reliance Power and Reliance Capital all collapsed.

Ambani is one of 24 Indian billionaires, all but one of whom are poorer than a year ago. Another 29 Indians lost their billionaire status entirely as India's stock market tumbled 44% in the past year and the Indian rupee depreciated 18% against the dollar. It is no longer the top spot in Asia for billionaires, ceding that title to China, which has 28.

Russia became the epicenter of the world's commodities bust, dropping 55 billionaires--two-thirds of its 2008 crop. Among them: Dmitry Pumpyansky, an industrialist from the resource-rich Ural mountain region, who lost $5 billion as shares of his pipe producer, TMK, sank 84%. Also gone is Vasily Anisimov, father of Moscow's Paris Hilton, Anna Anisimova, who lost $3.2 billion as the value of his Metalloinvest Holding, one of Russia's largest ore mining and processing firms, fell along with his real estate holdings.

Twelve months ago Moscow overtook New York as the billionaire capital of the world, with 74 tycoons to New York's 71. Today there are 27 in Moscow and 55 in New York.

After slipping in recent years, the U.S. is regaining its dominance as a repository of wealth. Americans account for 44% of the money and 45% of the list's slots, up seven and three percentage points from last year, respectively. Still, it has 110 fewer billionaires than a year ago.

Those with ties to Wall Street were particularly hard hit. Former head of AIG (AIG) Maurice (Hank) Greenberg saw his $1.9 billion fortune nearly wiped out after the insurance behemoth had to be bailed out by the U.S. government. Today Greenberg is worth less than $100 million. Former Citigroup (C) Chairman Sandy Weill also falls from the ranks.

Last year there were 39 American billionaire hedge fund managers; this year there are 28. Twelve American private equity tycoons dropped out of the billionaire ranks.
Blackstone Group's (BX) Stephen Schwarzman, who lost $4 billion, and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts' Henry Kravis, who lost $2.5 billion, retain their billionaire status despite their weaker fortunes.

Worldwide, 80 of the 355 drop-offs from last year's list had fortunes derived from finance or investments.

While 656 billionaires lost money in the past year, 44 added to their fortunes. Those who made money did so by catering to budget-conscious consumers (discount retailer Uniqlo's Tadashi Yanai), predicting the crash (investor John Paulson) or cashing out in the nick of time (Cirque du Soleil's Guy Laliberte).

So is there anywhere one can still make a fortune these days? The 38 newcomers offer a few clues. Among the more notable new billionaires are Mexican Joaquín Guzmán Loera, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine to the U.S.; Wang Chuanfu of China, whose BYD Co. began selling electric cars in December, and American John Paul Dejoria, who got the world clean with his Paul Mitchell shampoos and sloppy with his Patrón Tequila.

The Top 20 Richest People in the World

1. William Gates III

Net Worth: $40 billion

Source: Microsoft/U.S.

Age: 53

Marital Status: Married, three children

Software visionary regains title as the world's richest man despite losing $18 billion in the past 12 months.
Stepped down from day-to-day duties at Microsoft last summer to devote his talents and riches to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Organization's assets were $30 billion in January; annual letter lauds endowment manager Michael Larson for limiting last year's losses to 20%.
Gates decided to increase donations in 2009 to $3.8 billion, up 15% from 2008.
Dedicated to fighting hunger in developing countries, improving education in America's high schools and developing vaccines against malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS.
Appointed Microsoft Office veteran Jeffrey Raikes chief executive of Gates Foundation in September. Gates remains Microsoft chairman.
Sells shares each quarter, redeploys proceeds via investment vehicle Cascade; more than half of fortune invested outside Microsoft.
Stock down 45% in past 12 months.
"Creative capitalist" wants companies to match profit making with doing good.

from tag twitter

Why We Often Write About Twitter And Will Continue To Do So

(more..)

The Hive Mind: Find meaning with Twitter

2009-03-07T11:22:00.001-06:00

Chris Allison (@Chris_Allison) CMO of Centsports. just posted an article titled Welcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter. He discusses searching on Twitter but what’s more interesting is the title. The closest thing we have to a collective consciousness is Twitter. That’s what makes searching Twitter so exciting. You can find things that are happening and those that happened. Because its real time, you can also find people who are near you or who were near you.

Being able to do advanced twitter search’s is required to tap into this Hive mind and Twitter search Operators are the language that you can use to talk to the Hive. Use with Hashtags and the Minus sign to filter, Use Near to find local tweets and connect with people and use Since and Until to watch time.

Here is a question that you can ask on Twitter? Who in NYC just tweeted. The search to use is near:NYC within:1mi

Show tweets near:

Within: 15101525501005001000 miles

:NYC within:1mi

1 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

tweetncoffer: @wcgallego I have too many other shows to watch. I'm just saying it would be a nice alt to Leno. Oh, but Conan is Coming soon...what to do

iPhone: 40.764229,-73.986778

1 minute ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
Roz2010: http://twitpic.com/1wnpe - mommy taking my son to run errands, he scored some new shoes. converse high tops.

iPhone: 40.759254,-73.992653

4 minutes ago from TwitPic · Reply · View Tweet
Roz2010: http://twitpic.com/1wnp1 - mommy taking my son to run errands, he scored some new shoes. converse high tops.

iPhone: 40.759254,-73.992653

4 minutes ago from TwitPic · Reply · View Tweet
ESco09: @NoTTsTheManaGer lmao!

iPhone: 40.757511,-73.976707

5 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
jadedid: On the train http://twitpic.com/1wnmk

iPhone: 40.753464,-73.998169

6 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet
tweetncoffer: Any deals on Austin street in #foresthillsNY? Tweet back with the deets!

iPhone: 40.764229,-73.986778

6 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet
tweetncoffer: I didn't even make it 5 minutes watching Fallon before I fell asleep. That show is on too late for me.

iPhone: 40.764229,-73.986778

10 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet
ACEofthePACK: Listen to Pray For Me - Joe Budden.. He is Definitely one of the best doing it..

iPhone: 40.753952,-73.976837

12 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet
silverph: @ChicMom at least you have a choice. 

iPhone: 40.754971,-73.988190

13 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
robbmonn: Pizzatown is the best. http://twitpic.com/1wn94

iPhone: 40.758334,-73.988064

16 minutes ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet
mandalatv: It sure knows how to snow out here.

iPhone: 40.753413,-73.990066

19 minutes ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet
silverph: If I charge for every tech advice I give to friends and other people, I'd be rich by now.

iPhone: 40.754971,-73.988190

26 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet
silverph: @kchohensee somone tweeted that 765t was disappointing. Any problems encountered?

iPhone: 40.754971,-73.988190

29 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet
ESco09: @recession_proof when don't u let the tiger out the cage. That shit been roaming the street since 03 LOL

iPhone: 40.757511,-73.976707

32 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
silverph: @technical_itch disappointing?? Why? I'm about to buy one today.

iPhone: 40.754971,-73.988190

33 minutes ago from TwitterFon · Reply · View Tweet

Advanced Search

Some more examples:

twitter search
Finds tweets containing both "twitter" and "search". This is the default operator.

"happy hour"
Finds tweets containing the exact phrase "happy hour".

love OR hate
Finds tweets containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).

beer -root
Finds tweets containing "beer" but not "root".

#haiku
Finds tweets containing the hashtag "haiku".

from:alexiskold
Finds tweets sent from person "alexiskold".

to:techcrunch
Finds tweets sent to person "techcrunch".

@mashable
Finds tweets referencing person "mashable".

"happy hour" near:"san francisco"
Finds tweets containing the exact phrase "happy hour" and sent near "san francisco".

near:NYC within:15mi
Finds tweets sent within 15 miles of "NYC".

superhero since:2009-03-06
Finds tweets containing "superhero" and sent since date "2009-03-06" (year-month-day).

ftw until:2009-03-06
Finds tweets containing "ftw" and sent up to date "2009-03-06".

movie -scary :)
Finds tweets containing "movie", but not "scary", and with a positive attitude.

flight :(
Finds tweets containing "flight" and with a negative attitude.

traffic ?
Finds tweets containing "traffic" and asking a question.

hilarious filter:links
Finds tweets containing "hilarious" and linking to URLs.

news source:twitterfeed
Finds tweets containing "news" and entered via TwitterFeed

As an aside, Google is a hive mind too, but their data is often collected as a side effect of user action, whereas the majority of Twitter’s “thoughts” are genuinely created and intentionally produced- carrying on. ……

Putting It All Together:

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little more about what you can do with Twitter search. Here is an example of putting it all together using #inauguration, near:collegestation , since:2009-01-20, until:2009-01-20.

You can see the results here.

Note: Twitter’s servers went all crazy eyed when I did this search near Washington DC, my guess is they’re just overloaded. I went ahead and submitted a note via their help form so hopefully they’ll look into it. Either way, the power of the search remains the same; it’s only a matter of Twitter getting their servers more prepared for larger searches; when they do, you’ll be ready.

Happy searching, welcome to the hive mind.

see Welcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter.

The Now Web: The web will die this summer.

2009-03-07T08:54:00.001-06:00

noone will remember www and email, that was the web then, folks will feed and tweet

read more | digg story

Find Your New Favorite Website

2009-03-07T08:44:00.001-06:00

PC Magazine has released their list of Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. The list includes all sorts of sites like Serious Eats, ExpoTV, FixYa, HowCast, and FriendFeed. I love lists like this - they're awesome for finding new sites to browse!

read more | digg story

The web will die this summer.

2009-03-07T08:14:00.001-06:00

The Social Web is currently used for Sharing. Sharing pictures, links, profiles, hobbies and such. The current social web does enable some people to people meetings too. This people to people meeting via the social web promises to completely change how goods and services are produced and consumed. The Social Web represents the future network that will supplant the web in most peoples consciousness. The web will most likely die this summer and most people will only know about their Social Networks.

This Social Web combined with Social media will create an open global distributed knowledge sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, causes and concepts. Social media are distinct from industrial media, such as newspapers, television, and film because they blur the line between consumers and producers. With Social media we are all both at the same time.

Cheap tools that enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, means that industrial media will eventually become too impractical. Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media creates shared meanings, new knowledge and new ideas.

The term Social media most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). (see Social media)

Reach, Recency, Usability, Usefulness and Accessibility

Standard media measures show that Social media is more effective than industrial media.

Reach - both industrial and social media technologies provide scale and enable anyone to reach a global audience though Social media is faster, cheaper and simpler.
Recency — though industrial media is currently adopting social media tools to keep up with how fast social media moves knowledge, its unlikely that an organization can compete with millions of creative and resourceful people. Social media will always be faster, vibrant and more authentic than anything done by any team.
Usability — industrial media production often requires specialized skills and training. Most social media does not, so anyone can operate the means of production. Social media can be consumed in different formats and on different devices.
Usefulness — Most social media is active. Everyone can affect the story. Old media is passive, like watching TV.
Accessibility - Social media tools are generally available to anyone at little or no cost.That means that anyone can compete with LA Times!

Social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Social media is continuous and eternal. The story never ends. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments,instant messaging or even editing the stories themselves.

Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — i-brokers. (see Social web )

Some Social media software applications

Communication

Blogs: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Vox
Internet forums: vBulletin, phpBB
Micro-blogging / Presence applications: Twitter,Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku
Social networking: Avatars United, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Skyrock, Netlog, Hi5_(website)
Social network aggregation: FriendFeed, Youmeo
Events: Upcoming, Eventful, Meetup.com

Collaboration

Wikis: Wikipedia, PBwiki, wetpaint
Social bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Stumpedia, Google Reader
social news: Digg, Mixx, Reddit
Opinion sites: epinions, Yelp

Multimedia

Photo sharing: Flickr, Zooomr, Photobucket, SmugMug
Video sharing: YouTube, Vimeo, Revver
Art sharing: deviantART, Behance
Livecasting: Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Skype
Audio and Music Sharing: imeem, The Hype Machine, Last.fm, ccMixter

Entertainment

Virtual worlds: Second Life, The Sims Online
Online gaming: World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Age of Conan
Game sharing: Miniclip

Search Twitter and Google –The Now and then web

2009-03-04T07:23:00.001-06:00

Top 10 Twitter Search Results interlaced with Google search results. Check out my Greasemonkey script that Shows 10 results from Twitter on Google search pages.

The script is located at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43553

Top 10 Twitter Search Results with Google search

By Tweet Feeds — Last update a few seconds ago — Installed 2 times.

Why the real-time web is important

2009-03-03T13:37:00.001-06:00

Alexander Vanelsas in his article Why the real-time web isn’t important is plainly wrong because the real value of the Now Web is not the real-time nature of it but the dynamism of this new web. Its about the pace of the information. The fact that the information is changing so fast means that the users can actually change the event or story. Think crowd sourcing ….

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:

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.

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.

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!

Closer to the moment

2009-03-03T13:22:00.001-06:00

Jonathan Gosier in the article Digitizing the Moment: The Realtime Web and the Developing World, captures the spirit of the Real-time web also called the Now Web. The Now Web brings all of us closer to the moment. Maybe the time when there will be no secrets. If there were no secrets, we might solve more problems faster.

“Earlier this month I blogged about the role Twitter played in alerting people about a fire that was occurring in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. Incredibly, I (and hundreds of others following Twitter user @kahenya) knew about the full sequence of events in detail before even the local affiliates were on the scene! The same scenario has played out time and time again (most recently in India and in China).

The Full article:

Digitizing the Moment: The Realtime Web and the Developing World

by Jonathan Gosier Published February 27, 2009 @ 08:07AM PST

(Photo via DigiActive)

One of the break-out trends of web communication is the push to get ever closer to the moment of events, as they happen. It began with instant messaging and chat rooms and extended into SMS and eventually micro-blogging. Earlier this month I blogged about the role Twitter played in alerting people about a fire that was occurring in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. Incredibly, I (and hundreds of others following Twitter user @kahenya) knew about the full sequence of events in detail before even the local affiliates were on the scene! The same scenario has played out time and time again (most recently in India and in China). The current buzzword for this trend is 'the realtime web'. That is, those people all over the world connected by PDAs, Smart-phones, mobile devices, netbooks, desktop computers etc. and what they are doing as close to 'now' as one can ever hope to get (before it becomes 'then').

Ever Closer to The Moment

So far the real-time web is even in it's infancy in the first world, but what do these new technologies mean for developing nations?

Souktel is a Palestinian start-up that uses SMS gateways to distribute and aggregate Job and Aid information in the West Bank. It's an incredible resource during times where travel, communication and even power are cut. Theoretically, mobile operators would be the last form of information to go down in a crisis situation. The infrastructure is sparse enough, and the staff displaced enough to keep a network up through whole conflict if necessary. Unlikely, but possible. Still, the value of Souktel to the region is hard to really quantify, if only for the speed at which information can be shared rather cheaply. Most recently Al Jeezera partnered with Souktel and the mobile incident reporting tool Ushahidi for a project that allowed citizens living in Gaza to build and view collaborative comprehensive maps (using Microsoft's Virtual Earth) of both critical incidents and aid necessities. These maps also included Al Jazeera's news coverage mapped by location as both text and video.

This is where the power of the real-time web applications really shows itself. Living half-a-world away from something as tragic as a mortar blast, you can know more about that moment in time right down to the hyper-second, than the people who were there to witness it first hand. Video from multiple angles, multiple first-hand accounts both in micro-blog and blog form, informed reporting; all these things culminate to create an experience that would make the writers of the movies EAGLE EYE (2008) and ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998) proud.

The Use-Case

Let's imagine the following scenario:

The fictional African nation of Bamzia is at an international, humanitarian stalemate. The world is watching but information can't be distributed through normal means. But a woman is walking from her village with a small device that carries the hopes and prayers of her neighbors. She doesn't know how the device works, she barely knows how to turn it on. It may as well be witchcraft as far as she concerned, but she knows that the contents are far more valuable than the device itself. She makes the long track from one village to another to see her ailing son, but before she sees him she hands the device to the town Elder who then hands it over to his son.

Weeks ago, an aid worker had shown him how to use it. 'Just press this button, all you have to do is press this one button.' He remembers only that part. Nothing about the fact that this device is a mobile server capable of broadcasting, short-range, to a number of similar devices. Nothing about the fact that tens, if not hundreds of emails would be distributed to a local area radio network (either wifi or bluetooth) that would then distribute those emails to computers and mobile devices alike. He just knows that when he presses that button, the village will receive news about whether or not the rebels or the government have won, whether someone's sister or father has been killed, whether or not the daily football score was in favor of his country or another...

While not exactly an example of real time web communication, in the above scenario I'm describing mobile devices capable of asynchronous storage and broadcast via radio device. 13 million people carry such technology around in their pockets everyday in the form of an iPhone or any number of other mobiles. With a powerful enough antennae and wifi-boster, even the iPhone could be used for point-to-point communication with another iPhone. The point is, the technology is there, the capability is there, it takes very little effort for people to repurpose what you and I might consider a luxury, to be a positively disruptive technology. In this case using mobile devices as peer-to-peer nodes that can be used for real-time messaging or time delayed delivery of bulk messages.

The New, Agile Short-Wave Radio

Of course, the real value in this technology is in the ability to allow the average African country citizen to bypass the media, to bypass the government and even in some cases, to bypass the carrier; to deliver messages to loved ones, humanitarian workers or peace-keepers. People have done this for decades with the aid of single-sided short band radio broadcast stations. The difference is now the broadcasting and the station itself is far more agile. It fits in your pocket, it's hard to even tell when messages are being distributed or received. You can use them with the command line, a touch screen GUI, a stylus or your voice. Mobile devices come all shapes and sizes, from all manufacturers. The one constant is the ability to use a variety of protocols to transmit and receive digital information...usually far beyond the reach of the people who would be inclined to suppress that communication.

Even when the message is being suppressed, with tools like Feedelix and FrontlineSMS, users can truly use devices as disruptive point-to-point communication independent of infrastructure entirely. Feedelix was born out of the need to spread unfiltered information when the Egyptian government began censoring all communication using the countries SMS gateways. To bypass these blocks, the creators took advantage of other capabilities of the phones. FrontlineSMS is software plus some hardware kit that literally turns any PC into an local SMS or MMS gateway. Barring interception or scrambling technologies (which are available), it's the perfect form of communication off the grid. In this case, the realtime web would allow people in the field or in other such 'hot zones' to communicate with a central base or controller easily.

In conclusion, the realtime web is the evolution of a number different technologies we've seen before: the short-wave radio, internet relay chat, the instant message and SMS/MMS. In the form of micro-blogging, we can contextualize these moments with immaculate detail using maps, video and other data available via the web.

Twitter Following/Update Limits

2009-03-03T11:44:00.001-06:00

How many “friends” can you have? Twitter says its a factor of follower/following .

Officially the Following and Update Limits for Twitter are:

1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )

1,000 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices

100 API requests per hour

Following limits are different for everyone, and is based on a ratio that changes as the account changes. If you hit a follow limit, you must balance your follower/following ratio in order to follow more people- basically, you can't follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you.

Why does Twitter have limits?

Twitter limits alleviate some of the strain on the invisible part of Twitter, which prevents error pages and down time on the visible part. For the sake of reliability (fewer robots and whales) we've placed limits on actions like following, API requests per hour, and number of updates per day. This doesn't restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most people. Although the limits are a recent addition to Twitter, we've always been about limits, starting with 140 characters per update. We embrace the idea that constraint inspires creativity.

What are the limits?

We're starting with a few limits based on various parameters, and we'll be adding more as time goes on. We reveal some limits only when you reach them, and tell you about others in advance. Twitter currently applies limits to any person who reaches:

1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )
1,000 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices
100 API requests per hour

We've also placed limits on the number of people you can follow. The number is different for everyone, and is based on a ratio that changes as the account changes. If you hit a follow limit, you must balance your follower/following ratio in order to follow more people- basically, you can't follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we've concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.

What if I hit a limit?

People using multiple API clients at once may see the per hour API request limit, as usual. (You can request whitelisting if your app can't function with limits.) Aside from that, most people will not be affected. If you do reach a limit, we'll let you know with a handy error message letting you know which limit you've hit. With the exception of the follow limit, all limits are time based, so you'll be able to try again in 24 hours. If you have problems with limits, visit our troubleshooting page for more information.

Comments

AllanGoesDMB

Some of it you say here is rubbish - I follow 191, and is followed by 198, and I just met the LIMIT, when I tried to follow one, that just had started following me... Hmmmmmmmmmmm... Could there be a malfunction in your programming?

Feb-09 2009 21:13.

sturg58

I have so many emails of people following me that I can't count the pages; yet when I try to click from email to site and add follow: am lucky if I can add 1 it has been this way for days.... Some these people will be really neat to chat with and want them to know I want to chat or share similiar likes, concerns and such but It is really getting flustrating since I am following the email that have came to me tell me they are following me! So what do I do to make it work or fix what ever is going on! I am confused and fairly new to internet things as this.

I have been with myspace for years and keep adding to them and now am on several others I have just started like facebook, and fanbox... I never had a problem adding someone else on their.... if I found people on a group and wanted to add them to me then it worked... now I have added some and am stunded cause add doesn't work and doesn't tell me anything after following an email.... I have had some come back saying no longer on and such!

I tried to leave a comment or message for someone and when I pushed send it came back to many tweets to try again... That was one on an email following me I wanted to add but couldn't who had information about Vit B6 being made into a drug and not going to have out ..... she had the web site to find the information and wanted to thank her since I use B 6 for muscle spasms.!

So what do I do or can I do???? I am trying to teach other older people how to use the site... looks bad when it don't work for me! I have lots of friends who I have told to come to twitter... we have been on facebook and chatting and wanted to do the same here? but not if you can't add each other... I don't want to make people mad for not getting back to some... the emails have been here for two months and this has been happening... just never took the time to figure out where to go to ask for H E L P !

Thanks for you attention and help....

Linda

Feb-14 2009 11:52.

jonlyles

What is a reasonable ratio of following/followers? I have 1,555 followers, and am following 2,000 so my ratio is 77.75%. Am I really a red flag for Twitter?

Feb-16 2009 09:32.

dmorelandphotog

I have 2001 followers and had 800 people following - now i'm losing followers because i can't follow back and i can't follow some people that i would love to maintain contact with....how is this ratio determined if it's different for everyone and why can't it just be turned off? Isn't the purpose of social networks to allow you to be social? If someone finds someone else uninteresting then allow that person to unfollow the other, but this limit thing is crazy.

Feb-17 2009 18:49.

druiven

i follow only 15 and have 15 followers, but i hit the limit???, are other spamming with my user name? I recieved e-mail of unknow people who want to follow me, and well i do not think i am that interesting. So do others recieve e-mails from some kind of program that i am follwing them without me knowing it? so i hit the Limit.

Feb-19 2009 04:48.

WritingDad

Finding it odd that I'm running up against the follow limit here. I'm following 48 and have only 40 followers. I have several new followers recently and at least one who I *was* following but the system doesn't want to let me follow any of them back. Difficulty here.

Feb-20 2009 11:06.

nathanlindorff

I am having the same problem as WritingDad. I currently follow 15, and have 6 followers, and I have eventually worked out that I have reached the limit. 2 people I followed have also dropped off and cannot refollow. The ticket I initially raised is 33842.

Feb-20 2009 15:09.

BobBabcockNow

The staff running this board really needs to get a life! I got blocked for a week because I found a bunch of listings of people/organizations I'm interested in? I haven't been able to find any specific rule and there was no warning that this could be a problem resulting in the account suspension - until it was suspended. Gimmee a break!

Mar-01 2009 23:43.

Cachceebusiness

Twitter, come on guys! You created a social network, but i cant approve people who want to follow me? I understand if I am just out there clicking oneveryone... but what about those who request to be part of my social network, AND I AGREE>? You need to fix this. Get on the ball, before another company does. Thanks.

Mar-02 2009 07:59.

Now Web experiences

2009-02-10T09:22:00.001-06:00

Huge shared real-time experiences are the single most noticeable things about the Now Web. The Real-Time Web that will unseat Google has been unfolding for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious. The live streaming mashup of the plane that crashed in the Hudson River is the future of crowd sourced media. Search ala Google cannot be real-time. Google indexes the historical web but it misses the real-time story. And that is what matters today and will especially matter when lots of solutions are created very fast in real-time.

Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web!

Written by Bernard Lunn / January 16, 2009 10:35 AM

The era of dominance is shrinking. IBM dominated tech longer than Microsoft did, and Google's period of dominance will be even shorter. As with IBM and Microsoft, a great and wealthy company will remain (after a painful period of post-dominance restructuring). But during the period of dominance, it is hard to imagine anything else. Vast fortunes are lost in attempting a head-on challenge (whether they are search engine challengers to Google, operating system challengers to Microsoft, etc.), and disruption never happens that way. Google has no problem adding enough semantic smarts to see any challenger off. It's the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious.

Event-Streaming Mashup of the Plane Crash

In case you missed it, this live streaming mashup of the plane that crashed in the Hudson River yesterday did what no media company could do. It is the future of media -- crude, simple, and missing loads of things we would want, yes, but new media always show up that way.

Last month, I saw the power of Twitter's real-time search when I needed to find out about Gmail outages. That was hardly a fascinating topic, not prime-time worthy. But many other people pointed out other simple yet valuable usage cases.

But that was only Twitter, and not prime-time news. The mashup yesterday was fascinating because it drew on all the real-time sources, including video, to create a compelling story. The tool used to do it, Storytlr (our review), bills itself as "Your life online"; in other words, lifestreaming, which has tended to get a big ho-hum from me. I mean, who is really in interested in my daily blah-blah-blah. There are 6 billion souls on this planet; get over yourself, please. Following this story, though, maybe it could become an event-streaming mashup platform for media.

And in Other News: Yahoo Boss + Twitter = Real-Time Search

This BOSS developer understands that real-time needs context and that that comes from archives, and you need search for that. BOSS and Twitter make an awesome combo. Both are API-driven and enable tons of creativity and value creation from the community.

Why Real-Time Is Google's Achilles Heel

Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else. It finds me after-the-fact reporting on major stories from major media companies. But it misses the real-time story. And that matters today.

Sure, Google can play in the real-time web. It can buy Twitter and anything else it fancies. It will always be a big and powerful company and will make money from search just as IBM made money from PCs and Microsoft makes money online. But IBM did not dominate the PC business, and Microsoft does not dominate the online business. Likewise, Google will not dominate the real-time web.

What is the Now Web?

2009-02-10T08:53:00.001-06:00

The term “Now Web” is the real-time conversational web that evolves as the user uses it.

Its the web that contains real people (twitter tweets, facebook updates, flickr, Youtube, tumblr etc.). This web is different from the web that contains robots, large indexes, databases because it changes very fast. This new web might initially complement the static web of today but will eventually replace it. As information overload increases, the only way to manage it will be to use a real-time web.

The term “Now Web” might have been coined by John Borthwick in his article titled Creative destruction … Google slayed by the Notificator? Fred Wilson also talked about it when he wrote about John Borthwick’s insights on the New web, oops the Now Web.

The “Now Web” creates new experiences for Internet users. These experiences rely on or enable the near-instantaneous exchange of information and online content.

The Now Web

Borthwick calls it the "Now Web."
"There is something new going on here," muses Borthwick, whose New York firm has invested in nearly 20 startups over the past year. "Somewhere in the past few months, the way that I experience the Internet, and specifically live information, changed. There is a 'Now Web' emerging out of an ecosystem of loosely coupled products.
"The density of the conversations and the speed at which they emerge and evolve is different," he adds.

Fred Wilson on the Now Web": "My first experience with user-generated content was in the '90s, with GeoCities, where you built a Web page, put a couple of pictures on it and you were done," Wilson says. "Then blogging came along in the late '90s, and people started to post stuff on a regular basis on the Internet."
Even with the onset of the now ubiquitous Web log, digital content was rarely viewed or exchanged instantaneously. Enter Twitter, a deceptively simple service launched in 2006 that asks you to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less and then distributes your answer within moments to anyone on the service who has chosen to "follow" you. Whether or not the immediacy, informality and brevity of these "tweets" are to everyone's liking, the approach has had a major impact on Internet communications.
For example, although Twitter was not designed to distribute news, it functions as a grass-roots wire service, regularly beating traditional media on news stories, from earthquakes in China to bomb scares in Chicago.
Twitter has only a few million users, compared with the tens of millions of people who use social network Facebook Inc., but it is one of the fastest-growing services on the Web, with a growth rate of 600% over the past year, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says. The company's growth has not gone unnoticed by investors. Twitter was recently valued at $100 million, and the service has attracted an impressive list of backers in addition to Union Square and Betaworks, including Bezos Expeditions, Charles River Ventures, Digital Garage Inc. and Spark Capital, as well as high-profile angel investors such as Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape Communications Corp. (acquired by America Online Inc. for $4.2 billion in 1999) and Ron Conway, an early backer of Google Inc.

"...Twitter Search changes everything. Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set."

"Snagged this article "Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? (GOOG)", from Silicon Alley Insider by John Borthwick".

About this blog

2009-02-07T19:55:00.000-06:00

This blog discusses the Now Web. The real-time web. Robert Scoble foresaw the Now web last year and talked about it this year. The Now web is real and changing the web as we know it and how we use it. The promise of crowd-sourcing and universal connectedness has been fulfilled by the Now Web. The Now Web is the pulse of the human species at the beginning of the 21st century.

Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?

Is the Real-Time Web a threat to Google? Rackspace executive Lew Moorman sure thinks so.

He’s right. Fewer and fewer of my search behaviors have been on Google lately.

And last week friendfeed did something very important: made it a lot more possible to do powerful real-time web searches.

First, the problem with friendfeed is it is too geeky. But ignore that problem for a moment, because if they don’t get it right, or make it something that the mainstream wants, well, you’ll see the same kind of search show up on Facebook (which has been making moves lately to be much more open) or Twitter.

So, why is this stuff working?

Well, because it’s with your friends and THEIR behaviors. Your friends are a lot more trustworthy than anyone else. How do I know that? Because while I was in Davos George Colony, CEO of Forrester handed me the results of a report they did on Trust and they found that people you know are the most trusted. Far more than corporate or personal blogs. Yes, I know you don’t trust me that much. That’s OK. I don’t trust your blog much either. :-)

But, if I know you (thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed I have gotten to know thousands of you) I can build a much better recommendation engine.

Oh, and even more troubling for Google is that Facebook and friendfeed have a lot more metadata to study.

What is metadata? It is data about data. Well, in Google’s case, the metadata is the linking behavior of people in the web.

But look just on friendfeed. What’s the metadata there? Everytime I click “like,” something I’ve done more than 16,000 times now, I’m adding metadata. Everytime I add a comment, something I’ve done more than 8,000 times now, I’m adding metadata.

What other metadata is there? Well, they still can study linking behavior. I can link to my discussion of how cloud computing will change programmer behavior, for instance.

What else? Well, friendfeed knows how many of my friends also liked that item. They also know how many people clicked on that item (although they haven’t surfaced that information yet).

So, now, let’s look at search.

First, if I need to know who the best retailer is to buy, say, a Canon 5D Mark II, is it better to ask the people I know, like I did here on friendfeed, or go to Google and deal with the SEOs? Try doing that search over on Google. I did. Do you find a single retailer? I didn’t.

So, now, let’s get to friendfeed’s search.

Let’s do a search for anyone who has written about the Canon 5D MK II but lets constrain that to posts that have at least one like and at least four comments. Here’s the search. Note that the post I wrote just one minute ago is already in the results page. This is the real-time web.

Google won’t see that friendfeed item for hours and, even if Google’s spiders index it Google does not have enough metadata to study to let it do this kind of search.

Let’s keep going.

How is this for searching news? Well, right now Australia is burning. So, let’s search for “Australia fires” but lets constrain that search to anything that has five or more likes and five or more comments. Note the quality of the conversation that comes back.

How am I doing this? With friendfeed’s advanced search.

But it gets better than that.

How about we search for all Tweets that talk about the Australian Fires? We can do that.

“But can’t search.twitter.com do that better?” Well, yes, but can it also just show you all the Google Reader items people have shared? Like friendfeed can? No.

Can Google search show you all the Upcoming.org events that mention SXSW? No, but friendfeed search can.

Can you easily see all the YouTube videos that have the word Grammy in them? Probably over on YouTube you could do that. But can you now constrain the videos to the ones that have gotten some comments? With friendfeed you can.

But try doing THIS with Google: try finding everytime Dave Winer has commented on an item about netbooks. On friendfeed that’s easy. On Google? They don’t have the metadata to study.

Now, keep in mind that there aren’t many people on friendfeed yet. The numbers of comments there are not even close to enough to make all searches satisfying. But, look at friendfeed’s competitor Facebook. They have more than 150 million users already. What if Facebook were to get a search like friendfeeds?

Now do you start to see why I’m using Google less and less?

Lew Moorman is right.

Oh, and I got lots of answers to my Camera question before I was even done with writing this post.

UPDATE: you can search for “threats to Google” on friendfeed with this search. Fun to watch the comments come in!

RSS shows its age in real-time web (SUP and XMPP to the rescue?)

The real time web is coming at us very quickly, but it exposes major problems in our RSS/Atom infrastructure.

What is the real-time web?

You can get a small taste of that by watching the 5,300+ people I’m watching in Real Time on friendfeed.

The first time I saw the real-time web, I saw it when my tweets showed up on Twitter search and friendfeed within minutes. Sometimes within seconds. Now, imagine a world where everything worked like that. That’s the real-time web.

The problem is that our blogs don’t participate in the real-time web. They publish via RSS. RSS is not real time. RSS only publishes when a service like Google Reader asks for it. It has no way to wave its hand and tell your reader “hey, there’s something new here for you to get.” So, most RSS aggregators just visit on a regular basis, looking every few minutes to see whether something new has shown up.

For blogs that’s just fine. After all, most blogs take a few minutes to a few hours to write and it won’t kill you if you don’t read my words here for 20 minutes or longer.

But there’s a new expectation that we’re having thanks to Twitter. We want everything now in real time. I want to see everything that was published now and respond to it now and I want to have conversations about all that in real time.

This works on Twitter and friendfeed, which were built on real-time principles (er, messaging principles) rather than Web principles.

But when you try to hook the real-time web up to the old creaky RSS web, well, you see that the two aren’t very compatible.

Today I tried to setup an ego feed where I could track stuff that uses my name from around the web in real time. It doesn’t work very well. It’s slow. And, worse, friendfeed can’t tell where the original item came from so it gives it a generic RSS icon. So, it’s not only not real time but it’s ugly as well. I talked more about that with a bunch of people on friendfeed today.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, the geeks are exploring two technologies.

The first is XMPP. This is protocol developed for instant messaging applications but Twitter and friendfeed and others have adopted it. This is why when you Tweet the message shows up in friendfeed so fast.

The second is SUP. This was designed by friendfeed to be more efficient, like RSS. But with the added benefit that the feed provider can raise its hand and say “I have something new for you.” This makes real-time feeding possible, as developer Jeff Smith demonstrates when he built a system that shoved data into friendfeed in just a microsecond.

The third is GNIP, which is trying to build a service that stands between all sorts of services that are supporting the real-time web.

The problem? Very few services that could help the real-time web evolve are using either of these two protocols.

In fact, I was shown a real-time news service that’ll come out in March that didn’t use either of these protocols. Why? They didn’t even know that a real-time web was evolving on Twitter and FriendFeed and that there are dozens of tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck that are built on top of those too. Which is why I’m writing this post.

If you’re a developer, are you thinking about how to make your feeds real time? Why not?

One reason I can see is that it increases the bandwidth needed, especially if you’re pushing out a lot of data. So, in this harsh economic times developers might be unwilling to spend more resources. But there are some things, like searches, that need real-time results. I’d love to hear what developers are thinking here about balancing the need for low-cost systems with real-time publishing.

More info on SUP and the real-time web:

Paul Bucheit, co-founder of friendfeed, started a whole discussion about it.
OurDoings, a photosharing service, was one of the first services that supported the real-time web on friendfeed and they wrote about their experiences with SUP here.
The friendfeed blog has more info on the release of SUP.
Derek van Vilet made a WordPress plugin for SUP and explains that here.

UPDATE: Mike Taylor says I should have mentioned some XMPP resources in this friendfeed conversation. Here’s the ones he recommended: http://xmpp.org
http://metajack.im/
http://stpeter.im/
http://ralphm.net/blog/

Jonathan Jesse, in same friendfeed thread, added: “Robert: on Leo Laporte’s FLOSS Weekly they covered XMPP with one of the developers and the guy who writes the documentation for Jabber is a great overview of XMPP and more info: http://twit.tv/floss49 “

The Now Web

FriendFeed 2.0

Creativity from feeds and Activity Streams

Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content at SXSW Published by Dawn on March 16, 2009

The world’s billionaires got poorer.

World's Billionaires 2009

Related Posts

The Hive Mind: Find meaning with Twitter

:NYC within:1mi

1 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

Putting It All Together:

The Now Web: The web will die this summer.

Find Your New Favorite Website

The web will die this summer.

Some Social media software applications

Collaboration

Multimedia

Entertainment

Search Twitter and Google –The Now and then web

Top 10 Twitter Search Results with Google search

Why the real-time web is important

Why the real-time web isn’t important

Closer to the moment

The Full article:

Digitizing the Moment: The Realtime Web and the Developing World

Ever Closer to The Moment

The Use-Case

The New, Agile Short-Wave Radio

Twitter Following/Update Limits

How many “friends” can you have? Twitter says its a factor of follower/following .

Officially the Following and Update Limits for Twitter are:

Why does Twitter have limits?

What are the limits?

What if I hit a limit?

Comments

Now Web experiences

Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web!

Event-Streaming Mashup of the Plane Crash

And in Other News: Yahoo Boss + Twitter = Real-Time Search

Why Real-Time Is Google's Achilles Heel

What is the Now Web?

About this blog

Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?

RSS shows its age in real-time web (SUP and XMPP to the rescue?)