
  Live Web, Real Time: It’s Gonna Take A While To Get It - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/30/live-web-real-time-call-it-what-you-will-its-gonna-take-a-while-to-get-it/
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drusenko
This article lays out in better words than I could some of the reasons I'm not
a big believer in the "real time" buzzword-du-jour.

Just a sampling of some of the reasons "real time" is not useful to me in its
current form:

1- Too much data, no good way to parse through it. "Immersing" myself into
"the stream" is only useful for entertainment, when that's what I'm looking
for. Otherwise, what assurance do I have that I haven't missed a critical
piece of information?

Example: It would be great to be able to know of all of my close friend's
major life changes on Facebook, but this information flies by so quickly among
all of the banalities I'm lucky to catch it. Spending my day monitoring the
"stream" is not something I have time for.

2- Related to the above, primitive filters. Even with all of this data (such
as who all of my friends are), existing systems are remarkably bad at showing
me what's important to me.

The first thing that came to mind when the article mentioned "topic
communities" was Hacker News, and how absolutely valuable it is as a filter,
and how nothing else out there even comes close to matching the quality of
filtering going on here.

3- As pointed out in the article, spam is just as much of a problem for "real
time search" as it has traditionally been for blog search, which turned out to
be plagued by spamming/gaming, and useful for certain situations, but not as
useful as vanilla Google web search.

Those, among the other points raised in the article. Maybe it's because of my
specific time constraints, but I tend to find little value in an unstructured
"stream" format that flows by and then is locked up in some 3rd party's grips.

