The realtime stream

“I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”

Whether we are referring to your Facebook updates, the endless list of Twitter messages or your updating news from aggregators, Erick Schonfeld on Techcrunch histrionically talks up the “stream”. So, what do we mean by this stream? It is the constant ever-shifting flow of what is happening right ‘now’. There is no hope in ever consuming it all, but it is there to immerse yourself in and feel a part of. Or, as Damien Hirst once said when he was still interesting: “I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now”.

Like many hyped ideas related to the web, streams of realtime information are not wholly new. For example, RSS feeds — arguably the backbone of the realtime web — have been in development since the dawn of the mainstream internet in 1995, but realtime is a metaphor that helps us look at ideas anew, and reminds us that the web is much more than just a set of ‘pages’. Indeed, due to changes in the way the web has been built over the last few years, with AJAX to update pages, and services bringing the web to the desktop and mobile, the concept of the ‘web page’ has become less important. The idea of streams of realtime information makes the page even less relevant.

This shift to a focus away from pages and to streams of content throw up a wide range of challenges for both designers, content creators and businesses — challenges that few web practitioners feel they have worked out yet. Some of the questions we have been discussing at FoxLand include…

• How will advertising work in the realtime stream?
• How will advertisers be able to measure their impact?
• Will the mob rule?
• When there is so much noise, how will good content be found?
• What will be the design conventions for realtime?
• How do companies harness and learn from the stream?
• How will anyone make money? And is that important?
• And most pertinently, how will people not get drowned in all this raw information?
• Oh, and how do you actually spell realtime/real-time/real time?

It will be fascinating over the next few years to see how these issues resolve themselves.

Notes:
1. Photograph of Damien Hirst’s book by ~.~ mypictography.
2. For more thoughts and ideas about realtime, we’re involved with our friends over at The Realtime Project.
3. Due to some personal situations, some of the links and initial inspiration for this piece are now getting on a bit.