At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network. As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The infrastructure was in place for some time already, but when the browser appeared, the TV generation sat up and took notice.
Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself. For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector.
The standard attack on realtime is that it is the new crack. We’re all addicted to our devices, to the flow of alerts, messages, and bite-sized information chunks. We no longer have time for blog posts, refreshing our Twitter streams for pointers to what our friends think is important. It’s the revenge of the short attention span brought on by 30-second television ads — the myth of multi-tasking spread across a sea of factoids that Nick Carr fears will destroy scholarship and ultimately thinking.
Of course this is true and also completely irrelevant. My daughter told her mother today that her boyfriend was spending too much time on IM and video-chat, and not enough on getting his homework done. She actually said these words: “I told him you have to get away from the computer sometimes, turn it off, give yourself time to think.” This is the same daughter who will give up anything – makeup, TV, food — just as long as I don’t take her computer or iPhone away.
So realtime is the new crack, and even the naivest of our culture realizes it can eat our brains. But does that mean we will stop moving faster and faster? No. Does that mean we will give up our blackberries when we become president? No. Then what will happen to us?
The browser brought us an explosion of Web pages, produced first by professionals, then by small business owners, and finally, with blogs, by anybody. The struggle became one of time and location; RSS and search to the rescue. The time from idea to publish to consumption approached realtime.
The devices then took charge, widening the amount of time to consume the impossible flow. The Blackberry expanded work to all hours. The iPhone blurred the distinction between work and play. Twitter blurred personal and public into a single stream of updates. Facebook blurred real and virtual friendships. That’s where we are now.
Realtime has to be managed. The first tools in any transformative period are hard coded to the sensibilities of the radicals, the pioneers on the front lines. Scoble may appear ridiculous in his zeal for the extremes of the social media envelope, but his calculation is much more conservative than you might think at first glance. By opening himself to the tyranny of the crowd, he connects with that reality we each face.
The difference between 150 friends in our address book and 5,000 in Facebook is vanishingly small: we don’t have time for either. Trying to capture the nuances of friendship in a social media context is no more difficult than in high school, or easier. This is our life’s work, learning how to balance our needs with those of those we care about.
Once we reach a certain point in the shift, the tools begin to be more malleable as technologists surrender some control in search of viral spread. Bookmarks in the early browsers led to del.icio.us, Yahoo’s index to Digg, banner ads to page rank. The two-way quality of the network encouraged the viral spread of sharing.
Swallowed as we are in this vortex of change, it’s hard to see where the tools are going. Realtime has to draw on the human elements to ease the transition, harness the power, quiet the fear. The anger about Twitter mania, the reluctance to delve into the civil rights aspects of the quarantining of our data, the fratricide going on between bloggers and journalists — all these are symptoms of the power of this struggle for our minds.
Andreessen is one good reason why we’ll work our way through this. He talks impossibly fast, probably only a small fraction of the speed at which he thinks. Listening to him is an exciting and sometimes daunting experience, like listening to The Dark SIde of the Moon at 78 rpm.
Charlie Rose:
So to play offense for a newspaper for you means what?Marc Andreessen:
Oh, you got to kill the print edition.Charlie Rose:
You would stop the presses tomorrow?Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.Marc Andreessen:
Stop the presses tomorrow. I’ll tell you what. The stocks would go up. Look at what’s happened to the stocks. This investors are through this. The investors are through the transition. You talk to any smart investor who controls any amount of money, he will tell you that the game is up. Like it’s completely over. And so the investors have completely written off the print operations. There is no value in these stock prices attributable to print anymore at all. It’s gone.Charlie Rose:
So you would recommend to the owners of the New York Times, stop printing papers.Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, absolutely. You have to. You have to –Charlie Rose:
And take your losses –Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. You have to.Charlie Rose:
Like a courageous person.Marc Andreessen:
Chronic pain? Acute pain. How many years — music industry, same thing. How many years of chronic pain do you want to take to avoid taking a year of acute pain?
My 8 year old daughter doesn’t read the newspaper off or online, but I found her showing my wife new emoticons in Gchat today. Now she’s on a speakerphone talking with a friend while playing a game over the Net. I rarely see or talk with friends from high school or earlier, but what’s to prevent these virtual friendships from continuing to flourish for a lifetime? What are the consequences of the lowering of the barriers of space and time? We’re finding out, in realtime.
First!
I’m pretty sure the new crack is still the same old crack.
You have to kill it.
One thing that’s been lost in the transition of business from offline to online is supply and demand.
Investors in online ventures seem to think they can create demand where there was none previously and they have failed in an epic fashion.
If there is no demand, you should not supply. That will be the next revolution in the web.
and just because there’s a demand for something people aren’t willing to pay for, you can’t equate that to supply as we’ve found out with these horrible CPM numbers. Clickthrough self serve advertising is *NOT* viable. Big clients are *not* readily available any longer.
Few thought the browser would be successful as a platform for “real” work.
I spent the morning with Christopher Blizzard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7bFkcGDtsk
Speaking of those “Few”.
But, as long as we’re talking about it, Microsoft used their Windows monopoly to push IE and ActiveX.
Had they not done that it may not have evolved the same way and another desktop networking technology on the client and server may have taken precedence.
usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm
You can read through the lengthy DOJ exibits against Microsoft which detail their master plan to clone and superset netscape and ram IE down everyone in the entire world’s throat.
No sir, it was no accident.
Oh, Blizzard basically said this morning that Firefox 3.1 is adding video and audio DOM objects along with application side resource bundles, and that they abstracted firefox.exe process threading all the way to the javascript. Javascript code in firefox 3.1 can now launch real worker threads of execution. XSS is now allowed in certain cases.
Just a recap for those of you not in Socal. For those that are I will be there again tomorrow wearing my Guiness hat. :)
Internet Explorer is the worst product debacle since New Coke.
the new boss = the same old idiot
Wow, that’s some long blog post. I just posted the video, and an excerpt at that. ADD. Wow.
is it me but does this Andreessen guy look like a Cone Head from SNL?
Dude got chunky again too.
You are not alone.
http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2008/10/20/there-is-no-bubble-there-is-no-bubble-there-is-no-oops/#comments
SNAP! Very conically-challenged.
Steve. The concept you are talking about is real. I think that the problem is the term real-time. Real-time sounds too intrusive/Instant messaging. I have heard Dave McClure use the term the “now web”. I am not sure if that is the right term but it seems more positive than “real-time”.
realtime works just fine for me. positively 4th street
Alright then! Promise to not be bitter when a marketing type person finds a fancy name for it :-)
I promise
I must be on crack, I could have sworn Edwin misspelled bitter as biter. I remember saying what the f*ck while reading his comment.
Are you guys spell checking and correcting people’s comments now?
yes
Thanks Steve.
The NYT shutting down its printing presses strikes me as a bad idea. There are only 3 or 4 major papers that make sense in print and the NYT is one of them. Smaller, big cities could use a paper that gets a cores set of news form the NYT and then adds all the local flavor. It’s silly for every paper to have a reporter in Iraq or at the Oscars.
@pwb Marc is not talking about shutting down NYT. He is pressing for transform it into an organization which can survive in the online ecosystem.
Oh, please. The NYT is garbage. Their coverage has been going downhill for over a decade. And their credibility has been shot. If you don’t know this already, you’re not paying attention.
Yep… Just check how many sites like the one I’ve put
In the link above are keeping you updated on all
The hot topics you have today on twitter and digg.
great interview.
Reading Steve Gillmor engenders a realtime war in the chewy chocolate center of my psyche between boredom at the utter emptiness of meaningful content and anger at his willful butchering of the English language. The hot breath of a surge in the network of my neocortex tells me that tonight, anger has won.
I’m just wondering do any of you use Twitter as a way to bookmark links. I haven’t made the switch 100% but I can see it coming. Or is that just me?
Mr Andreessen’s interview was very good. Definitely not a waste of my time.
No. And, maybe so.
>For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure
when you talk like this, Steve, you give away the store. You still talk about a bus somehow moving in one direction carrying a message, only now you hope it’s *you* driving the bus or dropping the message in it instead of some central broadcaster like Charlie Rose. But you’re still not getting just how interactive it is.
Good interview! thx u :-)
“Realtime has to be managed… Scoble may appear ridiculous in his zeal for the extremes of the social media envelope, but..by opening himself to the tyranny of the crowd, he connects with that reality we each face.
The difference between 150 friends in our address book and 5,000 in Facebook is vanishingly small: we don’t have time for either. This is our life’s work, learning how to balance our needs with those of those we care about.?
The artists always know this first. Visual art manages the flow by putting a frame around “reality,” in space. Novels and poems put frames around “reality” in time. That’s how real time becomes intelligible and then manageable.
Future social media tools will be like an art form.
And I feel like Cliff Gerrish right now:-)
thanks for the interview
Is it me, or is Marc starting to look like Dr.Evil?
Dr. Evil or Mr. Clean.
Thanks for pointing out the interview, Steve.
The trouble with all of today’s newspapers is that they contain ‘Yesterday’s News’.
So in this new Web era of ‘Real Time’ Social Media, the need for people to purchase a daily newspaper is slowly dying.
A few years ago I use to always purchase The Times newspapers in London. But due to a number of factors, especially the pricing of The Sunday Times – I have decided not to buy either one anymore.
I can now read particular articles from The Times, as well as read other favs like Business Week, Wired and Vanity Fair all Online.
So what Marc Andreessen says about the New York Times is 100% right.
In printed Media, no matter how big a brand name you have – the number of copies that you need to sell to make a decent profit, will decline year by year, until you go deep into the Red.
Unless a huge Printed Media Brand Name is not owned by one of the few major Broadcasting Networks, the real value of Printed Media indepentents will hit rock bottom.
Whilst there is still some market value with a large number of Printed Media Indies, they should be courting the big Media Companies, with the ‘For Sale’ Signs.
Eventually even The Times newspapers will lose large readerships, until they may only decide to publish a limited copy of their Daily Printed Editions.
In the future The Times will be integrated within The Sky and Fox News Broadcasting Networks and become a key component in reporting and delivering Realtime Social Media both Online and on TV.
Of course there will always be a demand for Printed Media. But unless the owners and editors of these Newspapers and Magazines don’t adapt to these changes in Realtime Social Media, then they will have to stop the presses.
Once all of the print media goes away, how long will the online versions be able to stay profitable?
And how many sites (tech crunch included) consists of links to media sites and comments by users? Once the media sites go away, how long will these sites remain?
What’s “78 rpm”, grandpa?
Just read that in people in Kenya are just now using cell phones to make payments, buy things. The interface didn’t need to be designed to mimic the experience of browsing the web with a larger monitor because none of them ever had.
Managed, yes, assuming one can actually get a real time stream. As I remarked on FriendFeed just a bit ago, a real time stream has value if there is a) information; or b) conversation. When the handle to the faucet is turned off, either by entities or individuals, there is neither, and the value disappears.
It happens all the time, with Twitter, in real life, and online.
Your question about virtual friendships is an interesting one, since those faucets can be switched on and off at will, as I and I’m sure your daughter has discovered. When that happens, the rush of real time become just another form of personal rejection.
The real-time stream is a myth until the barriers fall away, at which time it will indeed have to be managed, and a new set of skills acquired to cope with the overload and the isolation.
Great post, Steve, and thanks for the link to the Rose interview. I’ll suggest a companion piece, the 5,000 Days TED presentation by Kevin Kelley.
http://is.gd/18sN
5,000 days ago, we didn’t predict what’s happening today. No reason to think we are any closer to predicting the next 5,000 days.
I really like Andreeson’s chronic/acute pain reference. The music industry in particular seems to enjoy mega-doses of chronic pain without realizing they will eventually end up at the same place only poorer in the end.
As we continue to spread broadband across all cultures and classes, the Internet itself will shift radically just like it shifted not quite so radically when AOL decided to open its gates and let all their walled garden denizens roam the web.
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
Steve Gillmor
I love your posts. Please write more. And tell Mike he can come back too.
Congratulations steve, this post is 100% better than your first.
I would give away the newspaper for free and sell more advertising of local businesses.
It is important to actually understand the real business behind a momentum. A better view is expected out of Marc. Just because tens of millions are using the free service does not mean it is am important and integral part of people’s lives.
Facebook for case-n-point. I could money that Facebook does not have much more than more ads as their best guess revenue build up strategy. How many more ads and how more revenue will it bring? Times have changed. Good and smart people from Facebook are running away by the dozens as they have realized that the company does not and have a better revenue strategy. Twitter had the same problem today that it had day one; where and how will revenue show up, apart from ads. Ning does web pages for people (social networks). Social networking has failed miserably in developing into business overall. Some might have lucky wins for the short term (Bebo, StumbleUpon, etc) but look at them now?
Get a reality check and admit the problems and look for different avenues of innovation that actually has needs in the market, social front or business needs.
Ciao
Andreessen absolutely correct. And there’s hugeness in realtime!
Very weak analysis and absolutely devoid of any serious thoughts.
I honestly think Andreessen sounds like a crazy man. I do love my realtime crack (twitter, particularly), but I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that stopping the presses on newspapers is the magic bullet that will bring us into the next phase. Stop printing for newsstands… ok. But I think there will always be a place for the newspaper subscriber, the thump of paper on your front walk. We may lose casual newsprint buyers, but let’s change the world in baby steps, shall we?