Earlier this week, I noticed a new feature on the New York Times website. Right above the “Most Popular Articles” box is a new “Times Wire” news feed. It features every article and blog post that has been added to the site during the prior 20 minutes, as well as an indicator of how many minutes ago the post was put up. This is apparently just the latest tool in the “real time” web trend.
At first I didn’t really understand why this sort of feature was necessary- it just seemed like unnecessary flash for the website of a product in a struggling industry. Does it really matter if I find out that Green Day is topping the Billboard charts now or 20 minutes from now? Same with things like the Facebook news feed- I really don’t need to know right now that some random college acquaintance thinks “reading by the pool is awesome.” Now I’m reading that companies like Googleare getting into the real time space- so where’s the value?
After sifting through some of the ways that people are using this technology, I find myself coming around a bit. After all, since the beginning of time, we’ve been trying to find ways to decrease the lag time between an action and when information regarding that action is disseminated. In 1900, you had to write a letter to communicate information across most distances. One hundred years later, you could obviously use a phone, but that wasn’t really the best way to communicate to a large group. Most people used email, decreasing that lag time to just a few minutes. But still, the lag time was there- anyone who’s tried to coordinate even a simple get-together over email knows it takes a while.
By trying to decrease the time between responses, we were working towards the goal of best approximating conversation. You might think that instant messenger does that pretty well- and it does. But again, it’s not the best way to speak to a large group, or to reach out to a larger audience. What we really want, is an instant way to reach our friends and strangers that is as conversation-like as possible.
I’ve written about the importance of engaging your constituents inconversations in some of my past posts. Real time technology is already starting to help organizations market their products. I recently became a “fan” of a website I use to measure and log my runs and they often post questions asking how they can improve the product and how people feel about the latest features. They wind up getting 20 plus responses on some questions and it helps to have a real time thread of the conversation so no comments are repeated and people can write based on other’s suggestions.
As more and more of the web turns to real time, there will be many more opportunities to market your institution. It won’t be long before Google aggregates search results from Twitter and allows others to see how many people have responded to popular threads on your institution’s site. Beyond that, we’ll be able to better organize that feed information to make it easier to digest. Tools like FriendFeedallow you to sift through the massive amounts of information and find what’s most relevant to you. These might seem like new trends, but looking at the broader scope, it’s really fitting with what’s been going on for hundreds of years.
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