So we’ve all had a chance to get used to the realtime Friendfeed beta. Something that was mentioned on the Gillmor Gang (I forget if it was the latest episode or the previous one) resonated with me, and I believe it came from Kevin Marks and Leo Laporte.
One of the problems some people have had is with the speed of the real time stream, and the assumption that you need to watch it all the time. That’s never bothered me, and when I heard that I understood why (note that I used the real time stream in the previous version). It also shows why you can’t just have a few friends, but need at least a bit of a network. Let’s generalize this to just in time streams. Let’s say we have a stream of information passing through (how it is being displayed is not important). You look at this stream when you get the chance, and most likely you will see many items of no interest, a couple that you like and perhaps are the first to see, which you might “like” or take some other action on, and then there might be others which are actually items that you missed cause they first streamed by some time ago, but others have “liked” them, commented, or taken some other action which brings them back into the stream. If it was something critical, which you just had to know, chances are on one of your connected devices someone would have let you know, whether via a Twitter DM, a text message, email, phone, etc. If it wasn’t that important, you have found it within a time horizon that works, what I’ve called just in time.
One of the mistakes that many are making is calling this the real time web and thinking about it only in the context of the web. Today some of us live a very connected life. I have my iPhone, my laptop on which I might be running Twitter, Friendfeed, a chat client, and IRC all at the same time. Information is whirling around us all the time. In fact, it’s a super stream even if it is not represented as such. To harness the stream we need filters (as per Clay Shirky). One of those filters is trust in your network and important bits of information finding you just in time. If your access systems are designed correctly, and you have the right network, then you will tend to find that happens. Is the current Friendfeed a perfect manifestation? No, but the streaming design is not an issue if you just trust your network to filter useful stuff for you.
Trusting your network
So we’ve all had a chance to get used to the realtime Friendfeed beta. Something that was mentioned on the Gillmor Gang (I forget if it was the latest episode or the previous one) resonated with me, and I believe it came from Kevin Marks and Leo Laporte.
One of the problems some people have had is with the speed of the real time stream, and the assumption that you need to watch it all the time. That’s never bothered me, and when I heard that I understood why (note that I used the real time stream in the previous version). It also shows why you can’t just have a few friends, but need at least a bit of a network. Let’s generalize this to just in time streams. Let’s say we have a stream of information passing through (how it is being displayed is not important). You look at this stream when you get the chance, and most likely you will see many items of no interest, a couple that you like and perhaps are the first to see, which you might “like” or take some other action on, and then there might be others which are actually items that you missed cause they first streamed by some time ago, but others have “liked” them, commented, or taken some other action which brings them back into the stream. If it was something critical, which you just had to know, chances are on one of your connected devices someone would have let you know, whether via a Twitter DM, a text message, email, phone, etc. If it wasn’t that important, you have found it within a time horizon that works, what I’ve called just in time.
One of the mistakes that many are making is calling this the real time web and thinking about it only in the context of the web. Today some of us live a very connected life. I have my iPhone, my laptop on which I might be running Twitter, Friendfeed, a chat client, and IRC all at the same time. Information is whirling around us all the time. In fact, it’s a super stream even if it is not represented as such. To harness the stream we need filters (as per Clay Shirky). One of those filters is trust in your network and important bits of information finding you just in time. If your access systems are designed correctly, and you have the right network, then you will tend to find that happens. Is the current Friendfeed a perfect manifestation? No, but the streaming design is not an issue if you just trust your network to filter useful stuff for you.