Timely | Mt. Major, New Hampshire | May 2009
Recent thoughts…
The real time web isn’t going away, so get ready for lots of talk (and a little innovation, hopefully).
- Are you excited about the potential of the real time web? (a well-worth-a-read article by Marshall Kirkpatrick in RWW); in short, the value of the real time web will come from Ambiance, Automation and Emergence, but read the rest of the article to see why.
- You’re not? Don’t care about the real time web? Cool. Then get out there and do something in real time life.
Active communication is stealing time from passive entertainment.
- On how communication is an increasing part of our entertainment:
The broader problem is the fractured market for people’s attention; traditionally attention has equated to revenue, but that relationship has gotten twisted with the whole “free” thing; with an increasing amount of time spent on work and entertainment shifting to communication, how can comics be a part of communication?
- About how real time data shapes real time decisions and the need for threaded conversations to make hashtags relevant;
- A still-simmering conversation in the comments about metadata and filtering the firehose of the real time web;
- How communication changes once “status is a conversation”;
- About “breaking up with the digital you”.
Online real time social lives build loose, ambient networks in a very different way than offline social lives.
- Trapped in a clumsy title and wandering thoughts from May 2008, Is the context of time the untapped issue in social media development?
… Drawing less attention [than social context], yet equally important, is the context of “time”. The context of time is implicit in any current discussion of location, yet somewhat missing from the discussion of social context.
Location-based applications are based on the idea of delivering services, offers and products to users relevant to their geographic location. We implicitly understand that delivering the services in a timely manner is a necessity, since people’s location can change rapidly, and that old geographic information may or may not be relevant. We understand that location is fluid and ever-changing.
But why don’t we assume the same about our social context? Our offline contacts (friends, co-workers, et. al.) naturally morph over time, strengthening, fading, losing touch, gaining strength and meaning. How can our online networks replicate this dynamically?
… It’s been interesting to see how our offline social conventions have moved onto the web….
By and large, they don’t. Existing social services and applications are based on the premise that our social networks are more or less static. Granted, the applications provide ways for us to tweak our settings, our content, our levels of privacy and sharing in order to “be different people” to different people. But in action, it’s socially difficult to take many of these actions because the online decisions we make are so much more transparent and obvious than our offline decisions. The binary yes/no decisions and terminology used by most networks (e.g. “friend”) are unable to capture the nuance of our offline social relationships. Our learned, socially-acceptable ways to handle the changing nature of relationships have not yet adapted well to the Internet.
We know how to be social and manage relationships offline, but we’re still learning how to to this online.
And I’ve got a feeling we’ll be working on it for a long, long time…
