The Real Time Web & You

At first, we were blessed with the core web technologies that we all know and love. Hypertext, Email and Message Boards. These mediums are all fine, but they all suffer from the lack of any real time components. Email is real time if you use Gmail or another client that simulates push, but in its infancy, there were limitations on how often you could check your POP server for new mail, and it was really a game of volleyball. Web pages were also plagued by staleness due to the complications involved in updating them and the fact that a user would have to bookmark it and check back for new content. In those days, you could check your mail weekly.

Instant Messages and SMS became really popular around 1997, and they served to fill the real-time gap in the information world. There were still problems with these technologies though; for IM, you needed to be online, and for SMS, you were limited to 160 characters of text, and most mobile phones in those days were cumbersome at best when composing a message. We were making progress, but still missing the entire notification layer. Services like Twitter, and SMS gateways allowed people to use SMS to notify each other of news, events and updates using a method that beamed the information right to their pockets! It seems that SMS has become the standard for short messages on the go, and with Twitter applications for mobile phones, or using Twitter vis SMS, people have become much more accustomed to sharing links and news while on the go, thereby delaying the time required for the news to propagate.

Even more recently, Google has added controls to their search results page that will allow you to filter search results by time windows. Would you like those results to be Recent, In The Last 24 Hours, The last Week? We’re getting more real-time, but not quite there yet. Pubsubhubbub is a new protocol that piggybacks on RSS and allows a hub to multicast updates out to subscribers when a feed is updated. What that means for you is that RSS is now very real time. In the past, you or your feed reader would check the source for updates. An inefficient and inaccurate way of getting fresh information. With Pubsubhubbub, the content creator publishes new content, the hub is notified, and it then “pushes” the updated content out to the Pubsubhubbub compatible readers. The effect is literally instantaneous; it’s as quick as instant messaging. Google Wave is just about one of the coolest things to emerge since Gmail. It’s new, it’s powerful and few people fully understand what it does. Personally, I think its mystery and peoples initial reaction of “Why would you want that?” are only proof that it’s so new and so different that it can’t be pigeonholed. You can’t say that it’s like Email, or that it’s like IM because it’s not. First off, I’ll commend the Wave team on their nods to the Sci-fi series Firefly in the naming of the product, and the cool sounding error messages. “Everything’s shiny cap’n”

With all of this real-time information at our fingertips, the real question remains: Will we have enough time to get any work done with all this real-time updates and notification happening? I like the real-time products that are on the horizon, Google Wave especially. Just yesterday I was hosting the collaboration of a Google document and I was wishing that I could see my co-workers cursors in real time, and that I could play back the edits of the file (Wave does this). Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, Pubsubhubbub and other products that integrate SMS, real-time notifications and collaboration are very welcome in my book. As a matter of fact, I can’t wait until the whole paradigm of; “Hey, do you still have that file open?” comes to an end.