Realtime Web is a Realgood Time

Last week I spent Friday at the TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp conference all about realtime technologies and the Web. Here are 9 “key learnings” from my time there, which I will go on to discuss in more detail:

1. Dick Costolo (Twitter COO) says interesting things
2. Smart people have interesting things to say about filtering realtime streams
3. Marc Benioff thinks he’s pretty awesome, has never heard of Yammer, wrote a book
4. Professional realtime marketers make for an uninteresting panel
5. Paul Carr is an edge case, surprised by the existence of the phrase “Key Learnings“
6. Geolocation will enable the ambient realtime experience
7. Email can’t die just yet, but it may move down the stack
8. Realtime is impacting search right now and you should brace for more
9. Thao With the Get Down Stay Down rocked my world at The Independent

An Intro to Realtime

The Realtime Web is here. Twitter and Facebook feeds are throwing information around your social graphs in realtime right now. Google and other search engines like OneRiot (which now powers Yahoo!’s realtime search) are getting better and better at realtime discovery, and geolocation applications and technology is about to hit realbig with realtime realsoon. For real. But what is Realtime? It’s the removal of lag in the transfer of information either from you, or to you, or more likely, both at the same time. What information? It doesn’t matter – anything. Everything. That’s the point, and this is why so many people wanted to get together to guess about the future and hear about the present of the realtime Web.

1. Dick Costolo (Twitter COO) says interesting things

Interesting thing #1: RSS isn’t dead, it just got pushed down the stack. >> Some time ago Steve Gillmor said that RSS was dead. Now, TechCrunch writers are known to exaggerate, and I think that Gillmore was really trying to say that RSS was dead to him as a tool on the personal level. He no longer used RSS directly via his RSS reader, but that doesn’t mean that RSS wasn’t still functioning behind the scenes as a protocol to push content around the Web, and this is exactly what Costolo managed to express. RSS has lost it’s utility to a large degree as a direct tool that individuals use, and this has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter streams, Digg, and other technologies that bring interesting content to people continuously. Moving something “down the stack” means that it isn’t gone, but it is not in the interface layer anymore. There are many protocols behind sending an email, but we don’t have to think about them anymore – they are executed for us. There are many protocols behind how the servers that house this information work, but you don’t have to worry about those anymore either. At the beginning of the interwebs users had to interact directly with many of these protocols to get anything done. Now RSS is joining their ranks and being pushed down the stack – it will remain useful as a protocol that moves information, but individuals will interact with it less and less.

Dick also said that Twitter monetization and advertising strategies are coming very soon, but they’re not what you think.

2. Smart people have interesting things to say about filtering realtime streams

The panel on filtering out the noise of realtime streams may have been the most interesting of the day with representatives on stage from Facebook, Seesmic, Futurity Ventures, CrowdEye, Microsoft, Facebook, Thing Labs, and also Ron Conway. Noise in a realtime stream refers to information that you are not interested in, but what gets confusing is that the exact same piece of information may or may not be interesting to you depending on where you are and what you’re doing. It’s not as simple as whether a piece of information is right or wrong, because what you think is relevant changes based on the context in which you exist, so the definition of noise for an individual can change in realtime, making efficient filtering a daunting task.

Ron Conway – a man to be listened to – thinks that the big opportunities in realtime for the coming year lie in acronyms… more precisely, in cobbling together available technologies and APIs together to provide new and useful services out of the data that is currently available. Then add in some proprietary IP (intellectual property) like filtering or ranking algorithms to help filter out the noise, and put an innovative UI (user interface) on top of it, and bang… next big thing.

Amit Singhal from Google is excited by the explosion in the volume of data being created and the challenge it represents in terms of indexing, ranking, and serving it back to the user for their searches as quickly as possible. He also thinks that your private information should go to the cloud so that it can be included in search results for you. This means that it would stay private, but that Google would know about it and blend it into your results when relevant. Imagine your private messages from Facebook being shared with Google, but not publicly, just in reference to you personally so that you can go to Google and get a results page blended with messages to you, tweets from you, blog posts unrelated to you, and anything else. This is, of course, spoken as a true engineer who simply thinks that all information should be available in case it’s relevant, but most of us have privacy concerns… just kind of in general. It was also pointed out that this is why Google hates that Facebook is closed – because they have both public and private information. Google has public information, but not private (OK – they have emails, but have promised not to use them in search… maybe they begin to offer that solution at some point). But hey, point taken.

3. Marc Benioff thinks he’s pretty awesome, has never heard of Yammer, wrote a book

I stopped listening to Marc Benioff pretty quickly. He was full up on awesome juice because he had launched Yammer inside of Salesforce.com a year late, called it “Salesforce Chatter” and managed to talk about it for a long time on stage without ever mentioning that he was ripping off Yammer, which itself is an enterprise ripoff of Twitter. He also gave a free copy of his book to every attendee… I think it might have been called “Marc Benioff – How Awesome My Stuff Is.” I’d go check, but I left it on the floor of my room somewhere and haven’t felt like looking for it since before I forgot to tell the guy at the check-in that I didn’t want it in the first place.

4. Professional realtime marketers make for an uninteresting panel

A bunch of people like a guy from Ad.ly and the lady who Britney Spears pays to tell her that her millions of Twitter followers are a good thing to have talked for a while about stuff. Paul Carr injected some interesting points and levity, but it was a general bust, even with Paul’s funny hat. In a related note…

5. Paul Carr is an edge case, surprised by existence of the phrase “Key Learnings”

Paul Carr went on an on ranting about how disgusting and awful it is to add marketing and sales pitches into Twitter streams, and that Twitter streams aren’t like banner ads because they’re conversational, so it’s the equivalent of being paid to randomly shout “Drink Coke!” in the middle of a conversation with friends. Ok… I get it, but Paul Carr is an edge case. He’s one of the very few people on this planet who has been able to promote himself and his career through self-destructive tendencies. And while I think that’s completely awesome, I think he’s ignoring the fact that much of what we say and do as human beings is marketing. If I meet you and I like you, I may want you to like me back, and therefore I will try to engage you in a way that prompts you to enjoy yourself. Is that disingenuous? Maybe. Is it human nature? Most definitely. Look, Paul… we can’t all get jobs by being assholes, but boy sometimes I wish I could. The fact is that there’s a much thinner line than Carr would like to think between promoting yourself as part of human nature and promoting things in general.

6. Geolocation will enable the ambient realtime experience

Twitter is going to remain “opt-in” for geolocation, meaning you have to choose to share your location through the service, but as mobile experiences become more and more commonplace, and as Android phones and other smart phones begin to plug into sections of the market that the iPhone hadn’t already reached, it won’t be long until everyone can run geo-aware applications on mobile platforms. Things are about to explode in the geolocation space, and this is going to change everything. Just ask FourSquare, Google Latitude, SimpleGEO, and every mobile app that will be developed for Twitter starting now.

7. Email can’t die just yet, but it may move down the stack

Everyone is sick and tired of email. It’s inefficient for much of the communication we use it for, but it can’t go away quite yet, even with the onset of techs like Google Wave and Twitter for one simple reason and many complicated ones. For the sake of time, here’s the one simple reason: It’s the lowest common denominator of ID on the Web. It’s the bottom of the stack, if you will. To sign up for most things on the Web today you still need an email address. Other things will be built on top of it, added to it, made for it, etc, but it can’t go away until we don’t need it anymore.

8. Realtime is impacting search right now and you should brace for more

Realtime and geolocation are already impacting SEO (search engine optimization) and the relevance that search engines have on a user’s discovery process. Andrew Braccia from the venture capital firm Accel Partners shared that every pitch from a startup they used to see had the same breakdown of where new users were coming from – mostly Google, some from other engines, and some direct visits. Already he has seen that profile altered with Twitter and Facebook becoming significant and growing contributors to this discovery process. People are beginning to find information and answers to questions (which are not necessarily the same things, by the way) via their realtime streams, and these are discoveries that no longer have to be made by plugging queries into search engines like Google. This also translates into less ads served on search result pages, and less cash generated by clicks on those ads. The smart SEO consultant needs to start thinking now about what searches are going to migrate away from Google, and how to optimize their clients in alternative search and discovery processes that are being spawned by advances in the realtime Web.

Geolocation is going to be disruptive to search as well. If your phone knows where you are, then you can essentially walk through what Edo Segal referred to an ambient experience where information can be pushed to you based on what is known about you in combination with your location. Coupons that were once cut out of a newspaper can now simply exist in the ambient stream, and when you walk past a retail location (like Starbucks for example), the coupon may be pushed to you with the notification: “Hey [name]. Come on in for a dollar off your large mochaventegrandevanilla over-roast special!”

Search experts will have to learn to insert their clients into the mobile, geo, social, and ambient streams in order to consider them optimized for the searches that are migrating away from traditional search engine queries.

9. Thao With the Get Down Stay Down rocked my world at The Independent

I also went to see Thao With the Get Down Stay Down at The Independent on Saturday night. And while she didn’t tell the jelly joke like she did the last time I saw her, she did rock the house on the last night of their tour with the Portland Cello Project. And I did my part to ensure that San Francisco, and not Lubbock, TX, reigned supreme in their Outkast Singalong Contest. Ice cold.