I’ve been grappling for the past few months with the degree of importance to attach to real-time communications, as exemplified by XMPP (which I just learned yesterday stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). Why, I kept asking, is a three-minute latency period, while a message gets from Twitter to Twhirl, important? Why does Steve Gillmor keep making us talk about “track” (the ability to follow information in real time) on NewsgangLive?
Somebody finally brought it home to me yesterday. I wish I could remember who said this: “How would you feel if you dialed the phone and somebody picked it up and took three minutes to say hello?” That would feel like an eternity. And it would destroy the flow of conversation. Reveal yourself in the comments as my guru if you were the person who lit my bulb.
You can see the need for real time on a satellite TV interview when the interviewer is in Atlanta and the interviewee is in Baghdad. There’s that strange silence between question and answer. And you can see it when somebody dials 911 and it takes three minutes for an ambulance to get there. The patient dies. I could always understand the importance of Twitter and track for breaking news. But now I am beginning to understand it for politic as well. It could give us a true democracy if we use it correctly (not you, trolls).
This weekend Rick Sanchez used Twitter comments to interact with his audience on CNN. He asked questions of Twitter, soliciting opinions about things like the fair tax. He reflected those comments on the air, bringing the opinion of the Twitter community to a larger audience. Eventually, this could be a new version of focus groups, polling, and the development of a broader range of public opinion.
For months Steve’s been pounding at Twitter to bring back track, saying that micro communities can reach and impact larger audiences using the power of these new technologies, and we have all been struggling on Newsgang (myself more than most) with how to do this. Myself, I had even with struggling about WHETHER to do this, whether to spend my valuable time on micro communities and track as opposed to other things on my radar screen (like the election).
Now I see how they are connected. The live stream is everything. Like 20-minute delayed stock quotes, information explodes at the time of release and turns to ashes later.
If you are interested in a deep dive into these issues, Leo Laporte will have a podcast of Steve’s conversation with him yesterday on Twit.tv for download shortly. I just saw that yesterday’s show is up already, but the after show isn’t, yet. I’ll update with the URL later. And check out Karoli and Cliff on this, too. We are all thinking…
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- Community. It's Everything
- Adventures with the 3G iPhone
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