danieltenner.com: danieltenner.com — The questionable value of the real-time web
Josh Catone
· 1 month ago
100% agreed that real-time as a buzzword means that lots of crap that never needed to be real-time is being pushed at us to take advantage of the buzz. It seems like most of what is being pushed at me in real-time is more of a distraction than a benefit.
But there are certainly some valuable uses of real-time information. Sometimes when I watch "Top Chef" on TV, I'll check Twitter to see what the audience sentiment is while I watch -- maybe to check on audience reaction to a particularly ghastly decision by the judges. As silly as it is, that has value to be as a consumer of media by making me feel more connected to the community that watches the show.
Increasingly, marketing execs are using real-time search to gauge the success of advertising campaigns or new product roll-outs in real-time. For example, film execs are beginning to be able to tell by Twitter and Facebook chatter if a movie is going to be a hit or a bust. That can have a real-world effect on how they spend future ad dollars or how many theaters pick up their film in the next week. I don't know that the mechanisms are quite in place to take full advantage of that real-time knowledge, but I imagine that in the future, they'll have the power to adjust ad campaigns on the fly based on real-time feedback, which could theoretically save (or generate) millions of dollars.
Real-time can also help you feel connected to something that you're not actively able to participate in. Last month I attended a conference and the person sitting next to me was simultaneously following the hashtag of another conference going on in the area -- one that he had wanted to attend but obviously couldn't due to scheduling conflicts. He was able to extract value from both conferences, as they happened, because he was able to follow one in real-time using Twitter updates. Certainly you won't get as much value as actually attending, and he might benefit further from watching conference videos or reading wrap ups later, but he was able to feel connected to both events at the same time. And that held value for him.
Often real-time can be overwhelming and seem like a waste of time (and, as I said, often times it probably is). But I think that younger generations are being wired (neurologically) to be able to better handle and decode real-time information streams. I.e., my grandpa thinks it is absurd that I can watch a baseball game on TV, talk to someone on IM, carry on a conversation with someone in the room, and write an email all at once without really missing a beat. But we're wired differently -- he grew up in the 20s when things were more static, and I grew up in the 90s, with television and the Internet. Real-time might have more value for younger generations growing up now, with mobile phones and Twitter -- their brains have developed differently than mine.
Daniel Tenner
· 1 month ago
Hi Josh, thanks for the thoughtful comment!
You raise several good points. First of all, corporations can be consumers of real-time content too. I guess the arguments that I make in this article apply more to individuals, human beings... then again, any content consumed by a corporation is effectively in a work setting, which is what I suggested at the beginning: if your work depends on a certain kind of content, getting it in real-time can be a competitive advantage.
With respect to our ability to manage multiple distractions simultaneously, I hope we do get better at managing the distraction, but I don't think that adaptation is necessarily cost-free (though it is definitely beneficial on the whole, given the world we live in). It would be interesting to see if it is possible at all to make a scientific study of whether we are in fact more "productive" with our split-time, or we just feel more productive... Most productivity studies seem to imply that multi-tasking is bad for productivity, but they are focused on specific kinds of tasks, I guess...
In any case, thank you for your thoughts!
Morisy
· 1 month ago
Excellent post!
It really captured a lot of the problems with the early real time feed frenzy. And a lot of the problems you point out were *immediately* obvious when services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook Feed launched, but the signal v. noise wasn't bad ... yet. Now the problems are becoming hard to ignore as they do cost us attention, time and productivity.
I've found myself checking Twitter, RSS, etc. more and more through Feedly rather than real-time clients because it sorts, ranks, categorizes, and makes intelligible the real-time sea of information, and I imagine Google is hard at work on real time Page Rank to ensure that more critical real time data peaks up to the top.
But does "Real Time" matter? I think it can beyond the entertainment factor you mention. It matters in buying and selling, for example: Recently when apartment hunting, for example, I was reminded that within a matter of hours, one place you considered a steal was actually $300 more/month than an equally great place that just came on the market.
Or the age old question, "What should I do tonight?", is influenced by dozens of real-time data inputs: * Where are my friends? * What's my budget? * What's the weather like? * Is the line long at Jake Ivory's?
Right now, not much of this is available in a real time feed, but more and more is coming, and the ability to mash that data up and present it in real time can improve decision making. But in the end, it's all about getting the relevant real time data *when* you need it, not necessarily as it happens.
aweissman
· 1 month ago
Great piece - thanks for writing.
In some respects, real-time info is nothing new. Financial markets have traded on real time info for decades. For the user driven web, I think real time information alone is only of little value. What's new - and much much more interesting - however, is a real time flow of information that is essentially distributed by users, to other users (think Facebook, Twitter, disqus, many others). There is opportunity to create applications of real lasting value there. So, as I see it, without this "social" element the real time information stream is not where real value lies.
Daniel Tenner
· 1 month ago
Interesting point, and I'm sure the social filtering would help. Then again, even when filtered through your social filtering, distraction is still distraction, so unless your social network consists only of people who provide real value, it will be noisy. And then, of course, there's my other point - real-value articles are generally much less ephemeral, and so they don't actually *need* to be real-time...
Thanks for the comment!
Jason Cohen
· 1 month ago
Thanks for the kind mention. I completely agree with your argument against the RT web.
Consider the few things which merit being real-time -- those things are drowned in a sea of garbage. By not separating things by urgency, we no longer have that mechanism for prioritization.
I can't imagine this is making us happier in our everyday lives. The date cartoon is too true. You see people glued to a tiny screen, sending and receiving useless tidbits, rather than interacting with the world OR reading/writing something truly useful, inspiring, edifying, or any of the other wonderful things writing can be.
Thanks for calling it out.
Daniel Tenner
· 1 month ago
Hi Jason, thanks for your comment!
I'm sure the filters will get better... but even if they do, good content doesn't need to be read right now - so even a real-time web feed that was successfully filtered to include only the best things personalised for you would be relatively pointless.
And yeah, I've inflicted the blackberry to dates before (when I had one) and had it inflicted on me... Since I switched to the iPhone, I've disabled the automatic email notification, so I only check my email when I want to.
davezor
· 1 month ago
I agree with everything you've written, but I can't help but think that it doesn't matter.
Businesses will build whatever makes them the most money. Most of the time for consumers, this is getting people more of what they want, not more of what they need. Lately it seems the trend is moving towards an almost intravenous information sort of lifestyle; no matter what I'm doing, I'm always plugged in and getting tweets, emails, SMS, and every other kind of notification imaginable.
Yes, it's ruining our attention. But that isn't enough for it to stop. It needs to be more profitable to stop the flow than to keep it going. It isn't yet. If we can find a way to make money off THAT, then we'll be 100% set.
Louis Moynihan
· 1 month ago
Great persepctive, Real-Time Waste...
iquanyin
· 2 weeks ago
it's my first year on the web as it is now, and this very thing is what i've been thinking about, and exploring. time is the one thing of value you don't get back, and attention is what creates everything. i really like your articles. in fact, they're the first ones that have made me slow down and read them all the way thru (vs. skimming with half an eye on four other things, three of which are likely growl). i gain some focus and clarity from what you write. thank you.
All Comments
But there are certainly some valuable uses of real-time information. Sometimes when I watch "Top Chef" on TV, I'll check Twitter to see what the audience sentiment is while I watch -- maybe to check on audience reaction to a particularly ghastly decision by the judges. As silly as it is, that has value to be as a consumer of media by making me feel more connected to the community that watches the show.
Increasingly, marketing execs are using real-time search to gauge the success of advertising campaigns or new product roll-outs in real-time. For example, film execs are beginning to be able to tell by Twitter and Facebook chatter if a movie is going to be a hit or a bust. That can have a real-world effect on how they spend future ad dollars or how many theaters pick up their film in the next week. I don't know that the mechanisms are quite in place to take full advantage of that real-time knowledge, but I imagine that in the future, they'll have the power to adjust ad campaigns on the fly based on real-time feedback, which could theoretically save (or generate) millions of dollars.
Real-time can also help you feel connected to something that you're not actively able to participate in. Last month I attended a conference and the person sitting next to me was simultaneously following the hashtag of another conference going on in the area -- one that he had wanted to attend but obviously couldn't due to scheduling conflicts. He was able to extract value from both conferences, as they happened, because he was able to follow one in real-time using Twitter updates. Certainly you won't get as much value as actually attending, and he might benefit further from watching conference videos or reading wrap ups later, but he was able to feel connected to both events at the same time. And that held value for him.
Often real-time can be overwhelming and seem like a waste of time (and, as I said, often times it probably is). But I think that younger generations are being wired (neurologically) to be able to better handle and decode real-time information streams. I.e., my grandpa thinks it is absurd that I can watch a baseball game on TV, talk to someone on IM, carry on a conversation with someone in the room, and write an email all at once without really missing a beat. But we're wired differently -- he grew up in the 20s when things were more static, and I grew up in the 90s, with television and the Internet. Real-time might have more value for younger generations growing up now, with mobile phones and Twitter -- their brains have developed differently than mine.
You raise several good points. First of all, corporations can be consumers of real-time content too. I guess the arguments that I make in this article apply more to individuals, human beings... then again, any content consumed by a corporation is effectively in a work setting, which is what I suggested at the beginning: if your work depends on a certain kind of content, getting it in real-time can be a competitive advantage.
With respect to our ability to manage multiple distractions simultaneously, I hope we do get better at managing the distraction, but I don't think that adaptation is necessarily cost-free (though it is definitely beneficial on the whole, given the world we live in). It would be interesting to see if it is possible at all to make a scientific study of whether we are in fact more "productive" with our split-time, or we just feel more productive... Most productivity studies seem to imply that multi-tasking is bad for productivity, but they are focused on specific kinds of tasks, I guess...
In any case, thank you for your thoughts!
It really captured a lot of the problems with the early real time feed frenzy. And a lot of the problems you point out were *immediately* obvious when services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook Feed launched, but the signal v. noise wasn't bad ... yet. Now the problems are becoming hard to ignore as they do cost us attention, time and productivity.
I've found myself checking Twitter, RSS, etc. more and more through Feedly rather than real-time clients because it sorts, ranks, categorizes, and makes intelligible the real-time sea of information, and I imagine Google is hard at work on real time Page Rank to ensure that more critical real time data peaks up to the top.
But does "Real Time" matter? I think it can beyond the entertainment factor you mention. It matters in buying and selling, for example: Recently when apartment hunting, for example, I was reminded that within a matter of hours, one place you considered a steal was actually $300 more/month than an equally great place that just came on the market.
Or the age old question, "What should I do tonight?", is influenced by dozens of real-time data inputs:
* Where are my friends?
* What's my budget?
* What's the weather like?
* Is the line long at Jake Ivory's?
Right now, not much of this is available in a real time feed, but more and more is coming, and the ability to mash that data up and present it in real time can improve decision making. But in the end, it's all about getting the relevant real time data *when* you need it, not necessarily as it happens.
In some respects, real-time info is nothing new. Financial markets have traded on real time info for decades. For the user driven web, I think real time information alone is only of little value. What's new - and much much more interesting - however, is a real time flow of information that is essentially distributed by users, to other users (think Facebook, Twitter, disqus, many others). There is opportunity to create applications of real lasting value there. So, as I see it, without this "social" element the real time information stream is not where real value lies.
Thanks for the comment!
Consider the few things which merit being real-time -- those things are drowned in a sea of garbage. By not separating things by urgency, we no longer have that mechanism for prioritization.
I can't imagine this is making us happier in our everyday lives. The date cartoon is too true. You see people glued to a tiny screen, sending and receiving useless tidbits, rather than interacting with the world OR reading/writing something truly useful, inspiring, edifying, or any of the other wonderful things writing can be.
Thanks for calling it out.
I'm sure the filters will get better... but even if they do, good content doesn't need to be read right now - so even a real-time web feed that was successfully filtered to include only the best things personalised for you would be relatively pointless.
And yeah, I've inflicted the blackberry to dates before (when I had one) and had it inflicted on me... Since I switched to the iPhone, I've disabled the automatic email notification, so I only check my email when I want to.
Businesses will build whatever makes them the most money. Most of the time for consumers, this is getting people more of what they want, not more of what they need. Lately it seems the trend is moving towards an almost intravenous information sort of lifestyle; no matter what I'm doing, I'm always plugged in and getting tweets, emails, SMS, and every other kind of notification imaginable.
Yes, it's ruining our attention. But that isn't enough for it to stop. It needs to be more profitable to stop the flow than to keep it going. It isn't yet. If we can find a way to make money off THAT, then we'll be 100% set.