12:01 pm - Fri, Jun 19, 2009

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Thoughts From #140conf: “Now” Isn’t Now Just Yet

I had the pleasure of attending Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference earlier this week which resembled more of a tasting menu on Twitter than a smorgasborg.  As quickly as you found something nice to nibble on, it was on to the next flavor. This dynamic was by design given the breadth of topics, and organizer Jeff Pulver challenged us to extend the conversations from the crucible of the conference into the virtual sphere. I write this missive in that spirit.

The media’s Twitter spin has been about the power of now - how collective ambient presence from everywhere can pinpoint the elusive zeitgeist of the instantaneous in new and disruptive ways.  For all of the discussion about the implicitions and innovations of their API, few really discuss the premise of Twitter being “now”.   Twitter is just the latest in a string of pull technologies which have both delighted and failed us in the promise of instant gratification, following in the wake of email and RSS.  Twitter is no more “now” in terms of latency than say Outlook or Google Reader, neither of which you’d consider as an interactive communication channel like your instant messenger or telephone. However, unlike email’s POP3 and SMTP protocols, Twitter has distribution, scale and fault tolerance issues given that it is proprietary and centralized.

Some may counter that Twitter is simply a different communication channel for broadcast and on-demand consumption of the stream, but even in that capacity, it can improve considerably in terms of adoption of standards, speed, and scale.

Others are exploring alternatives to the pull technology challenges within Twitter, starting with the adoption of the XMPP standard as the appropriate platform for distributing “now” information over the internet. Within your browser, Drop.io, Collecta, OMGPOP, and Google Wave all utilize the XMPP subscribe/publish standard to reduce message latency and increase interactivity of not only text, but also files transfers, audio, video, and multi-player gaming.  Some are using WebHooks  as alternative to XMPPs inherent chattiness.  There are also stealth mode startups investigating how to reduce the latency even further for sub/pub news and messaging systems to emulate the speed, packaging and multicast (simultaneous sub delivery over UDP vs. sequential sub delivery over TCP) of financial market data from the exchanges.  Telecom, VOIP, and MMOG companies are also closing the massive scaling gap for push technologies.  The singular truism I’ve learned from talking to experts across these areas is that there is a segment of people who will pay a speed premium commensurate with how actionable the information received is. Urgency matters.

Given the relative nature of the present tense in an increasingly time-compressed world, we should acknowledge that the virtual “now” isn’t here yet, but now is coming soon.  At least until we discover the next “now”.