The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side attention economics | Hacker News Reader

The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side attention economics

danieltenner.com

52 pointsswombat23 comments

Consciousness work by filtering information. The problem with the real-time-web is that it demands too much cognitive attention compared to what it was supposed to give us in return (always relevant information in context).

But It's importance cannot be underestimated. In a better world, augmented reality allows us to explore a reality with multiple layers and always contextually relevant information.

With that in mind though, the current state of RTW is the stone age and we are nothing but a bunch of slaves ploughing through an overwhelming amount of information in order to find something of importance that we can then share with others through some aggregator.

In a better world, we will still receive way to much information to ever process. But instead of scanning each post as a separate entity, the RTW will reflect an emerging alternate reality based on knowledge our needs.

Until then RTW will continue to include more and more sources communicating most of them automatically, but my guess is that they will be part of a soup of the augmented reality universe and serve to in the end create an alternative matter based on information. Allowing for the construction of the agumented layer.

There is huge start-up potential to figure out a way to filter information in a way that allows for all sorts of information to pass through without any of it being more important, but where it together will create an alternative reality.

I would think that the next feature that aggregator will need to look at it a better filtering only surfacing things to me when they are of importance (again exactly like the brain works)

Sorry for the rant.

Good article.

The point about the term becoming muddled and meaningless is pretty spot on. When I first started hearing this term being used all over the place (heck, Toronto's already had a couple mini-conferences laced with this buzzword), I assumed we were talking about systems with "real time" data flows like Pachube.

Now the term seems to have boiled down to "I taped my F5 key down".

I am yet to find any use for the Real Time Web in whatever (twitter,email,facebook,rss feeds) format. As a consumer none of these actually enhance either my productivity or knowledge in anyway, they are merely there for entertainment.

Surprisingly, the only exception to that is probably FreeNode IRC , certain channels at least.

Yes, there are certain bloggers i want to read, certain discussions on HN that i want to participate in but it takes time for me to assimilate and understand what is going on, the RTW doesn't help me there.

I find twitter search useful. For example, when I was shopping for a newly released netbook, I searched the keyword on twitter for a few days, to see what people say about it and what new reviews are being released. After a few days, I was able to detect the "mood", in other words, how people feel about the product. That is very hard to achieve with just reading a professional review.

More generally, if I want to know what now is happening about something, twitter can usually deliver that.

"I searched the keyword on twitter for a few days"

There, you have used Twitter in the fashion of the "traditional" web, you just went to a RTW source thats all.

My point is i generally don't have any use for what "now" is happening, anything that is of importance generally has a longer time span and relevance to me and i don't "need" to know it straight away.

There are definitely a few streams that are very time-dependent and service way more utility near the event, rather than after the fact. Some recent examples, searching for "caltrain" after it was stopped a few weeks ago. Searching for "280 flooded" during a rain storm. Searching for "comcast near:SF" to see if anyone else was having connection problems at the moment.

We're not used to having down-to-the-second real time search yet, so it's harder to come up with use cases until we really become comfortable with these new systems. Most use cases we do see, like Trending Topics on Twitter, are discovery queries that will eventually be covered by Google's spidering, but there are whole categories worth of search cases in the long tail that won't be covered by just discovery.

I think discounting entertainment as not having value is where you're going wrong. This may be precisely where the value is for the constant update, interruptions interrupting interruptions, hyper-flow of information.

Other uses might be traffic information, black-friday sales, tornado tracking/response, stock trading, organizing and coordinating civil protest, and rapid response for brand managers.

The best use I've found of the "real-time web" is for tracking live sporting events that I can't attend or stream over the Internet.

For example, I play fantasy football and I noticed during Sunday afternoon that Kevin Smith (Lions' RB) suddenly stopped scoring me points. Did he get injured? I don't have cable & Google's "recent results" showed nothing... so I performed a Twitter search for his name and my worst fear was confirmed by dozens of Lions fans on Twitter: he was out with an injury.

The result of my search wasn't desired, but the "real-time web" was the only place to get the info.

I think the real value of the real-time web will show when the comments sections of all webpages are in real-time. This will allow users who are viewing an article on the same webpage, which may be over a decade old, to see a comment appear as it is sent. This will encourage users to comment back and forth across all webpages, no matter how old the page is, due to the real-time appearance of comments.

What are the chances that someone viewing a decade-old article will just happen to be viewing it at the exact same time as someone else is viewing it AND at the exact same time that this other person is submitting a comment on it?

A higher chance than you think, especially with search engines which offer immense amounts of historical content. I believe if there was a comment system put in place which informed visitors of how many other people were on the same page with them, this may encourage readers to chat amongst each other in real-time and bring life back to webpages which were once "ghost towns".

Would be the same to argue that TV is destructive because it has continuous broadcast. Do not like it turn damn TV of. Regardless of how much buzz the term has, it is valuable in some cases(some are mentioned din the article) and it is up to the user to decide what value it has for him. Rather than talking about negativity, just make it optional so user can make a choice of turning it of or on.

This reminds me of a project I worked on in a large enterprise years ago. All of their systems, believe it or not, were batch. Inventory, accounting, order processing - all data was entered into hold files, or worse, filled out with pencil and paper and turned into keypunch. All databases were updated in a large batch overnight. (Today, it's hard to believe anyone ever did that.)

Our project was to migrate all apps to a new real time package. They spent millions of dollars and when it was all done, the controller complained, "Who decided that we needed real time Accounts Payable? Why would we ever want to pay our bills faster?"

No one had ever asked that question before. No one even thought about it. We had spent $1 million on a module nobody wanted because IT decided it. Eventually he added procedures to continue to fill out all accounts payable transactions with pencil and paper and enter them into the on-line system at the end of the day. What a waste.

Same argument here. Some things you want faster. And you're willing to pay for them, one way or the other. But other things should just stay the way the are.

Some things never change: you actually have to think about your apps before you implement them.

I see this quite a bit in my current job.

Question for you, how did IT sell this to the business folks (or the buyer)? Was this under the auspices of enterprise agility?

Was this under the auspices of enterprise agility?

Exactly. If a customer called in an order at 6:30 a.m., it didn't even get to the data base for 18 hours. So there was no same day shipping and if it had to be scheduled, the schedulers weren't even aware of it until the next day. Real competitive disadvantage. Worth spending millions to solve.

Real time Accounts Receivables paid for itself by reducing Days Sales Outstanding by one day. But real time Accounts Payable? Made no sense.

The IT solution was a blanket decision made multiple levels (and cities) away from the people who actually did the work. Go figure.

Man I see this so much at my job. Its amazing that architects don't catch things like this. Was there any requirements written up or charters that justified moving accounts payable to real-time?

Its pretty inane, as you point out, how companies blindly apply strategies. Alot of times this is caused by simply cutting corners. If they would have had a body write up requirements (even high-level) for each department the would have caught this.

Were there any problems with the actual implementation? If there are these kind of problems at the architecture level, I can only imagine the issues that came up actually initiating and executing the program.

Back in January, a guy at the coworking space I was at that day announced that a plane had crashed into the Hudson. We were like - what? He said his girlfriend worked in a building overlooking the Hudson and saw it - and instant messaged him via AIM - and we tried to verify it. It seemed so out there. A plane in the Hudson?!

Twitter didn't have any info on Flight 1549 for a minute or so. In fact, the real time Summize search engine backend - seemed to be lagging in its indexing that morning. CNN and the other news networks were still reporting the same political/celebrity news of the moment.

Personal word of mouth just barely beats Twitter for real-time* information but it's very close. It's true crowd-sourcing (though questionable why people will tweet they are in an earthquake while it's happening - and not be safer).

* - My hardware/software RT engineer friends scoff at the mis-use of the RT term.

What is the value to knowing this information as soon as possible?

Excellent question. I can't think of a good answer. I originally thought it was about ego (e.g. knowing about something quicker than the general public). However, I think, personally, it's more about being able to observe an event from the distance of a first-person third-party (#lessconf is a great example) as the event unfolds (in, yes, "real-time") The thirst to acquire knowledge/news without the cost of having to actually have a personal or even virtual relationship with those sharing.

>>> If you’re a consumer of information (and we all are), turn off the live notifications, unless you need the information for your work. <<<

This looks like a common knowledge to fight distraction, but anyway: I currently experiment with email notification, and I start to reconsider using it again. The point is, that the small blurb doesn't actually distract me that much, and I immediately see that nothing important is coming, and as a result, I doesn't have an urge to check if some important email didn't come. And if something important came, I just know that immediately.

So what is the value of the real time web?

This article seems to say it's about immediacy, about finding out things faster than you would have before.

I've also heard that the real time web acts as a filter for news, so you can use the people you follow on twitter or your facebook to find out what information is important.

I know a lot of people on here are working on real time apps...what do you think that value is to the consumer?

The newer information is, the more valuable it tends to be to the consumer. People prefer to know what's going on sooner than later. Just look at old newspapers, nobody buys them except for historians and newspaper collectors.

The term is nebulous, but I don't see the value as questionable. For example, google "new ubuntu release."

The result isn't even close to what you want--the real time web will be a good thing.

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