Surfing the real-time web
It is now the middle of 2009 and the web landscape is already looking very different from the start of 2009. Twitter is primarily responsible for the surge into the real-time web. Seeing Twitter’s success in covering news before any main news site is remarkable. It is here. It is now.
Facebook saw the success of Twitter and subsequently changed their homepage (which I still think is a bad choice). Facebook also made the status update feed real-time: an inevitable change, considering they also opened the status API. What is this Facebook? Are you trying to become Twitter with photos and quizzes? C’mon now.
Seeing the real-time building, Google saw that they were losing search power and made options available to their search to make it more real-time.
The biggest surprise to the real-time venue is definitely Google’s Wave. Will it change the way we interact on the internet? Who knows. When you see a wave (a real one) approach, it might seem huge, but that might mean it might break before it’s of any use to the surfer. Meh, it’s a bad analogy, but you get my point. Will be really interesting to see what Google Wave can pull off!
So where to now?
I didn’t expect to see this surge into the real-time web. I’m wondering what web services will filter into the real-time environment. The implications are immense to me. It means that people are now even more connected, right now. Within 5 minutes of it happening, I knew about the hudson river plane crash.
What implications it has on our psyche, I don’t know. We are more and more, constantly aware of the world and its happenings…
Where do you think the real-time web will go? What do you think the psychological implications are for being constantly and instantly connected?
