conversations: local realtime versus global asynchronous - as applied to FriendFeed

FriendFeed has launched its Twitter-like "real-time" redesign, which has some of us unhappy and thinking about why we're unhappy.

What I think is that there are two different modes of operation you can address: real-time and asynchronous.

Across Realtime

So first, what is the nature of realtime, what characteristics does it have?
It's kind of a strange question in a way - we live in realtime.  It is now, I am typing.
But that nature is its strength and its limitation.
In realtime, a big part of your thoughts are concerned with yourself.  This is Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter's question is: What are you doing? but there's an implied "now" on the end.  What are you doing now?

Not what are you thinking.  Not what ideas have you developed.
What are you doing now?

This is a legitimate mode of interaction.  But it has issues:
* realtime doesn't scale, because you only have a very narrow window of immediate attention

I can talk to one person.  I can have a conversation with two people.
Apocryphal stories of Millenials or whatever gen we're up to now having dozens of chat windows open simultaneously aside, there's only so much time in the now.  In the now you can broadcast to many people.  But converse?  It's not like you can type into chat windows simultaneously.  The "multiple conversations" people have is really: slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, one after the other.  We are not multitaskers.  We are serial taskers.  At some point, that attention gets sliced so thin that all you can say is "yes", "no" and "lol".

Realtime by the nature of the limited slice you have, has to be: I, me, doing, now.

* realtime creates a false sense of urgency.  realtime is the pace of short-term business thinking.  realtime is the tick-tock of self-centred false importance.

Look at the crackberry man, out in the world, but staring at his little screen.  Out in the world, but living in his email.  He sent a message almost 10 seconds ago!  Why has no one replied?  Don't they realise he's important?

Yes, it's a caricature, but it has some truth.  Between your twitter follower alerts and your friendfeed follower alert and your facebook sheep throwing and your spam messages and the 100 other new emails and your tweetdeck and your calendar alarms... where are the cycles to, you know, actually think about anything.

Realtime is the buzz buzz buzz of busy-ness.  Business busy-ness.  But don't confuse activity with productivity.

* realtime is time-zone discrimination.  realtime is local.

Your scope of immediate thought and action is local.  In the now, a fire across the country is interesting, a fire in your building is ALARM ALARM.  Realtime is a great tool for re-connecting with your local community, with the people who are awake when you are, where you are.  But realtime by its very nature excludes the non-local, the timezone outsiders.

* realtime is loss of control

You can't keep up, the thought is gone, the tweet is gone, the friendfeed posting has scrolled... run twice as fast as you can.  Realtime brings not only false urgency, but since no one can keep up with everything, simultaneously, it means a loss of control, over information and over your ability to act.

* realtime is cr*p to monetize, except for search

Realtime is very rapid conversation.  Conversation is inherently hard to monetize.  Conversation is between people, in order to monetize it, you as the advertiser, the stranger, have to step in between the two people talking, and shout.  Imagine how popular that is.

Realtime conversation, scrolling off the screen second by second, is even worse.  Oh, they're talking about cats, I'll put up a cat ad... oh wait, they're talking about dogs... oh wait, they're going to go see Wolverine... oh wait, they're gone.  Oh ya, that's a genius space to try to stick your ads in.  Good luck with that.

You can monetize the search of realtime conversations, but don't confuse search with conversation.

** In Summary **

Realtime has value.  I'm in Ottawa, now.  If GCPEDIA goes down, I tweet that it is down, I see tweets when it comes back up.  I can ask a question of my local community, what's happening tonight?  is Bank Street closed?  where are the buses re-routed?

This is an absolutely useful connection and capability.
But it is only one possible way to interact.

Around the World in 80 Postings

The global asynchronous conversation, web pages linking to web pages, which turned into blogs linking to blogs, is another mode of operation.

There is no question hovering above the big empty box of your Blogger posting.  There is just a word: Create.

Not what are you doing, right now.  But what are you thinking, whenever.  Like this blog posting that I write now, but you may read at the appropriate time for you, in hours, days or weeks.

Asynchronous can have a measured pace, can be reflective, can weave in many different threads from many different sources, because you have the luxury of time.

* asynchronous is about the flow of conversation, not about the immediate individual acting

You link to me, I think, then link back.  I connect to your ideas, I don't speak directly in the moment to you.

* asynchronous is global, timezone agnostic

My friendfeed has people from all over the world.  Some are ending their day as mine begins, others haven't yet awoken.  Where's Berci?  Where's Bora?  Well it doesn't exactly matter, because if they post, I see their thoughts at the time of my choosing, and vice versa.

* asynchronous is actually a lot better to monetize

Because we're taking our time to scan and interact with long form ideas, you can figure out what we're talking about, and stick an ad next to that conversation, and we may actually have time to look at it.

** In Summary **

Asynchronous is about the global circulation of ideas.  I don't need to know where you are, or when you are, because I'm interacting with your thoughts at the time and place of my own choosing.

What this means for FriendFeed

Facebook and Twitter are already in the realtime, "what am I doing now" space.
Delicious and StumbleUpon and others are already in the "look what I found" space.

FriendFeed's strength was in the global, asynchronous conversation about the things that we'd found, the ideas that we have.  This is a particular type of conversation support that lends itself very well to scientific discourse, bouncing ideas back and forth around the globe, day after day.  The scientific discourse is a global asynchronous conversation, by its very nature.

Realtime mode is a nice feature for supporting conferences, when there really is immediate "this is happening now" to report on.  But it's a mode mismatch for long-form conversation about ideas.

As I have suggested on FriendFeed, it may be that in the end, with the divergence of the founder's goals from some of the users, we may have to write user requirements for the global asynchronous conversation, and if FriendFeed can no longer support them, then move elsewhere, or have a replacement site built.

What FriendFeed will lose is people who, at the time and place of their choosing, spend a lot of time on the site.  Time is attention.  Attention is eyeball you can put ads in front of.  FriendFeed will lose the people who were paying the most attention.

I was inspired to write this by Cameron Neylon's thoughtful posting Science in the open » “Real Time”: The next big thing or a pointer to a much more interesting problem?

In a way, this posting is part of my conversation with Cameron, despite the fact I have only the vaguest sense of where (in the UK?) and when he is.

We have taken different approaches to the issue of realtime, and in particular I want to raise a very important, indeed critical point that Cameron makes: filtering takes time.  One of the other incredibly powerful aspects of FriendFeed in asynchronous mode is that it bubbles up items of interest, through the collective action, the filtering that results from my friends liking and commenting on items.  When I open async FF in the morning, what I see is not the latest ideas, what I see is the most important ideas, based on the filtering of a community I trust.  Realtime, by its nature, has no time for filtering.  No time for filtering turns a curated stream of useful information into a firehose of content, the little specks of gold that dance in the stream lost because they are mixed in with the flood of useless noise.

Previously:
April 6, 2009  why I don't like FriendFeed beta