The Jason Salas Experience

Typically with any new technology platform, bark outweighs bite.  So often a new shift in thinking gets the online community so jazzed just based on raw potential, everyone buzzes about how cool, efficient and profitable the new paradigm could be.  All we need is a sound case study to reinforce our suspicions and support our theories.

It's apropos that I used the holiday break to track the emergence of Real-Time Web applications.  The relevance came in the form of me being able to track the pulse of "Christmas" as a searchable topic, seeing as how that specific keyword involved a scheduled event of global importance, and had enough intro/outro traffic for a couple of days before and after the actual holiday that it made the pace of updates in services like Collecta and Google reflecting real-time publishing incredibly entertaining to watch.  (Not to mention the breakneck pace of posts on the holiday itself.)

There were literally hundreds of thousands of tweets, Flickr images, news stories and open microblogging platform updates all having to do with the events surrounding December 25 all over the planet.  

The real-time search services performed beautifully, living up to their hype, facility to mammoth amount of work and delivering a user experience that carried high entertainment value, if not some sort of usefulness.  That's significant, because Christmas is naturally something we collectively knew about and could predict.

But that was only half of the equation.  Given its annual nature, everyone saw Christmas coming and mentally prepared to post all sorts of media to the Internet ad infinitum.  What we now need as the second half of the litmus test is for real-time search services to properly handle a major breaking story.

Twitter gained international credibility (and notoriety), by allowing its users to interact with the events unfolding in regards to the plane crash in the Hudson River, with the political strife in Iran, and with the untimely passing of Michael Jackson. If the new generation of real-time search tools can effectively harvest and report coverage of a news event of similar magnitude, with the publishing load imposed by the worldwide social networking community at an unprecedented scale, we'll have completed the cycle.  I believe they will.

And thus, will have achieved our case study.

Much these days is being written, (re)tweeted, posted and discussed about the crop of new services that make the first iteration of what's being called the Realtime Web possible.  Dealing primarily with search, a crop of enterprising platforms spearheaded by Collecta, Taptu and Google rapidly deliver a user experience that is unique: being able to see information literally within seconds of it being published online.

So while as a developer I salivate at the prospect of being able to harness new emerging platforms and the forthcoming generation of abstract frameworks that will empower me to write me own systems centering on an instantaneous feedback loop, the marketer in me wonders how I can exploit such technologies into valuable commodities.  But those concerns are trumped, perhaps more importantly, by the journalist side of my persona as I question the future of media as we know it.

I'm dubbing this balance The Realtime Paradigm": the symmetry between those who generate content and those who receive it.

The predication central to making a Web that includes discovery of new information, sans latency, is brevity.  The delicate synergy between content creator and content consumer relies on the pace of the former's ability to generate data and the latter's ability to take it in.  Obviously with the overwhelmingly exponential expansion of the 'Net's major social networks, the demand for knowledge is insatiable.  

It's unfathomable to think that even infinitely resourceful organizations like the mighty CNN would be able to crank out multiple 900-word essays and articles fast enough to satisfy the online audience's appetite.  Likewise, most people don't have neither the time nor desire to read a collection of aggregated feature-length compositions. It's too much work.  This also technologically enables more mobile adoption of platforms, working within the confines of screen and bandwidth limitations for handsets and smartphones.

So the next step becomes the impact on traditional media products - a regressive extension, if you will.  How will print media (already in the final stages of its own death throes), radio, television and even existing online platforms adopt this hyperaccelerated production cycle?  But before skipping merrily down that path, consider the shifts towards more condensed packaging that mass media has already seen.

You almost never see a double-feature movie anymore.  Several of Cartoon Network's shows in its Adult Swim programming block are only 11 minutes long.  The FX network features 3-minute recaps of that week's episode of its drama series after they've aired.  Songs on the Top 40 chart are getting shorter.  The average story in a newscast isn't as long as it used to be. Talk radio programs aren't as long as they used to be. Magazines have become more terse with their offerings.  

Clearly, consumer behavior has driven us into the Age of the Short Attention Span; those tasked with developing the information they rely on have to react accordingly if they are to leverage The Realtime Paradigm.

From a content creation standpoint, Twitter has been pretty revolutionary in (de)volving the way we've become accustomed to communicating.  I've said many times over the last year that as a professional broadcaster, anything I write now longer than the canonical 140 characters seems like an epic.  And this is, and will be, key to how realtime systems flourish.  We can keep our stuff of high quality, but in so doing make our material shorter and punchier, delivered in tasty bite-size morsels.

Media's not going flaccid by getting more condensed. It's getting more valuable.  Consider this: it took me 20 minutes to write and post this piece, where I could have generated 10 tweets.  You've made it this far, but Which would you have preferred?

So keep this in mind as we head in 2010 and the Realtime Web continues to take off.  The popular 'Net-lexical acronym "KISS" may be in need of revision, from hereon to be understood as "keep it short, stupid".  ;)

I've given up trying to keep track of the number of times I've heard friends, family and colleagues utter this all-too familiar sentiment in recent history.  It's evidently become an acceptable burden that society bears of weeding through what can be miles upon miles of posts from users within one's social network. 

In my own foray with the Social Web, I've deliberately kept my friend/follower lists small.  For me, the true value of my social graph is its brevity - quality content over inundation.  Don't get me wrong, I like discovering new people and what they have to say, but I'll eventually drop someone from my roster if their stuff isn't doing it for me.  Drowning in empty chatter is just pointless to me.  And that's a skewed indictment on how the way we interact with each other has (d)evolved.

The Web is no longer an interconnected network of hypertext-based documents and media files; it's become a subsystem of the digital projections of human beings.  The somewhat spurious utility a user obtains from their social graph - the collection of users within their social network and the connections between them - led me to question a theory I developed earlier this year.

I proposed an extension to Metcalfe's Law - the fundamental principle defining the value of all networks - to incorporate the added utility generated in a social application.  (Do I know how to party or what?)  Essentially, I concluded, the personal value of your social network increases even further not just with the nodes added (your friends/followers), but also with the extension in the outward users that, by association, you become connected to.  This overall value can be quantified by applying a coefficient to the initial formula n(n-1)/2.  

(That is, if you're into that kind of thing.)

So a thought hit me while paging through friend requests on various apps: for me, the aggregate value of my social network actually decays were I to add each and every person that solicits my connectivity.  I don't stay logged in all day reading posts, so I choose to experience my friends' activity in short info-bursts.  Were I to allow everyone, I'd be diluting my lifestream, degrading the overall experience and taking away what little of a life I have now.

As I see it, there are three major classifications of social network user on the Internet at the time of this writing:

1 - The Serial Friend-Adder: someone who prowls the safari that is cyberspace, actively hunting for any and all connections, happily rapidly extending her social graph outwards; she derives primary value from the sheer number of friends/followers she's amassed.  Her main source of pride is being able to say "I have [X]-thousands of friends!", caring less about the quality of the content generated thereby.  Her bragging rights are determined by volume.

2 - The Audience Expander: someone who meticulously increases their friendlist, but only as a means of imposing their own will on the world.  What gets this type of user off isn't so much the volume of users, but the quality of those that will receive their stuff and pass it onto others.  Think of this as the crass capitalist or dictator.

3 - The Pragmatic Pessimist: a reserved, happily sheltered, introverted online user, who cautiously rejects more friend requests than she accepts.  Her major utility is extracted from the efficiency resulting from a reduced number of posts through which to filter, 

In case you haven't figured it out, I fall into the third classification.  My philosophy is that if you're not generating any information that motivates, educates, entertains, inspires, angers, titillates or otherwise makes my life better, you're wasting my damn time.  And to me, this is significant.  But not all social networks are the same.

Let's look at the mothership for the modern social network: Facebook.  The mighty platform/internet within the Internet/online community/online operating system uses a bidirectional model that requires a user allowing a requester to be his friend access to that person's stuff, too.  So for every nth user added, you potentially affect your personal system's value by a factor of 2 (either increasing/decreasing it).

Now consider the model employed by Twitter.  The microblogging platform doesn't require a user to follow those who follow her.  So you have a fragmented system of interconnectedness, wherein a celebrity with 2.5 million devout followers hanging on their every word may realistically only follow 35 people - and not necessarily from that subset.

But of course, interacting with a social network, inline with society in the real world, is completely subjective.  The signal-to-noise ratio of social applications is something everyone determines for themselves.  I know people who are absolutely delighted to sit and read pages upon pages of posts, just for the entertainment value, albeit petty.  Cool.  Whatever floats your boat.

And of course, the converse applies.  Expanding your followerbase logically increases the chance that you can discover some really cool inbound things, or be able to pass on neat things to others.  So it's a sticky wicket to manage.  Go with what model works best for you.

And realistically...who thinks about quantifying the utility of their social graph?  Shut up and read.  ;)