If you haven’t noticed already, humans are painfully slow. So slow that it would take a human about a decade to be able to read all tweets twitted on twitter in a single day. Crazy huh. Obviously, everything is relative and only that is absolute. So, humans are slow compared to today’s machines. And since we are so slow, why do we want our digital world so fast? In fact we don’t just want it fast, we want it in real time, as it happens.
First off, if you’re confused, real time in today’s digital world is when things respond to events as they occur. Streams on the other hand are chunks of information delivered in an ongoing fashion. They don’t have to necessarily be live or real time. In the case of stream notification systems, the entity to be notified are humans and the events can be all sorts, like: interesting footy tweets, Facebook birthday party updates, news or weather updates from City TV, social media streams, community streams, utility streams etc. There are so many clearly useful streams for the slow poor human, that we start wondering if all this is so overwhelming that it’s just destined for a big #fail. At the end of the day, how can a slow paced common human keep up with even a fraction of these updates and then also follow his daily basis routine, and then be hopeful that at some point he can shut everything off and go for a coffee.
Humans are great at classifying and choosing, and okay at prioritizing. Given the right options and the right tools there’s a high probability they will actually make the right decisions. Here’s where Streams meet Real Time, Mobile, Diversity and the new web generation.
Not only can we follow up with our Streams, but they can be live in real time as long as they are completely asynchronous to our daily routine and we are able to use them at our own chosen time instances. Like when you check out live TTC updates while at the bus station on your BlackBerry. Or when I watch United playing Chelsea, I check LiveScore updates from the other games on my iPhone. It’s great to be reading some funny live streaming tweets about a lobster while waiting for food to be ready at the Lobster King. Not only do we have complete control of the pace of information but it’s also happening in real time.
The potential is so big that Twitter now has a Streaming API, Google just announced Instant “the search engine’s new streaming search technology”, Apple is forcing itself in with Ping, many other major and smaller players, and even startups are pushing this space fast and faster. Coupled with location based services, it only gets more useful and even more catered to needs of the very humans being served.
Here at Dashboard we are also excited about all the opportunities offered in this space and already working on projects that are making use of true real time, mobile devices and location services. The usefulness of such systems is clearly evident and very promising. So humans aren’t so bad after all!
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