

The Future is not Real-Time - endtwist
http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/29796275100/the-future-is-not-real-time

======
veidr
I agree that the The Future is not Real-Time, but I don't really think these
are new phenomena (neither real-time technologies, nor the fact that they
aren't The Future).

It's probably mostly just my age (37), but I feel like these things come and
go on a cycle.

My first brush with realtime was having a pager in high school. Wow neat, my
friends can get ahold of me even when I am out in the streets! Huh, lame, all
these people have my pager number now, and it beeps all the time and I never
know if it is worth calling back.

Then came ICQ. Most of my friends and college classmates were all over that
shit. I never understood it: text chat only seemed interesting to me late at
night when I was too stoned (or whatever) to focus on anything. It combined
the annoying immediacy of a phone call with 10% of the communications
bandwidth of actual conversation.

Then I got a cell phone, but by that time we had caller ID and other people
had cell phones (as opposed to the pay phones that had been calling my pager),
and so it was only a minimal intrusion because just glancing at it told me
that I didn't need to take that call right now (95% of the time).

So it wasn't too annoying, until the phones started to bleat our plaintive
little demands to read the "text messages" that they had become capable of. I
disabled the service.

Eventually we got to where we have data service and pocket computers
everywhere. (I love that btw.) So now tons of people are pecking out little
bleeps on facebook and twitter pretty much constantly. I don't really get this
behavior any more than I got ICQ.

I like reading realtime twitter bleeps, say, _when I search for something_ ,
or perhaps when I go on twitter to read stuff (if I did that), but why would I
want them at other times?

I feel like Clifford Stoll, sometimes, ranting in my cabin in the woods about
how e-commerce is never gonna catch on. Especially when somebody "pokes" me on
facebook. (Thankfully, I only see that when I log on every month or so to see
my sister's latest baby pictures.) But... what does that even _mean_? Why
would I want people to be able to "poke" me? Whenever they want? And seemingly
purposefully devoid of any content other thank the fact of poking me? Crazy!

So I fully admit that I don't get this latest round of 'realtime', but the
solutions are still the same as the last times realtime came around. Just
arrange to deal with information on your _own_ time.

You want your machines to get data in realtime; sure, why not? And it will be
cool if, in the future, we do indeed "find ways to artificially stem the
constant flow of information through algorithmic summarization."

But there's a simpler, manual way to stem the constant flow of demands on your
time: just reject them, and deal with them later, at your own convenience, or
perhaps never.

What exactly is it that makes that hard for some people to do?

~~~
freehunter
I love having text communication. Generally, I view voice as a waste of my
time. This is, I feel, the big disconnect between the younger generation and
the older generation. I hear quite a bit "if you're going to spend 15 minutes
texting, why not just call?" Because when I'm texting, I can set the phone
down and do something else while waiting for a response. Voice is real-time,
and very attention-demanding. Text slows it down a bit, condenses it, and
waits for my response. I can prioritize it. There's no ending of a call and
thinking "oh, I forgot to mention X", or sitting on the line trying to
remember what you were going to say.

The only thing missing is a global "busy" status. I feel this is due to the
lack of a globally unified text message (including IM and twitter) system. I
don't think there's a polite way to kindly tell someone to urgently shut the
hell up over text/IM, at least not that I'm aware of. The only annoyance I
have with text communications systems is hearing
"dingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingding" as someone sends me 15 messages
in a row when I am unable to respond.

The future isn't real time. The past is. A phone call is. The future is
sending information as quickly and painlessly as possible, and for "Gen Y",
this includes text/IM. These services don't demand attention, beyond letting
you know they're there. Then again, I grew up with AIM/MSN/ICQ, so again, I
feel it might be a generational thing.

~~~
dredmorbius
Knowing when to switch modes is very helpful.

Quick one-offs by text are great. Voice is much easier in certain situations
(when typing is difficult, when driving). And at times, voice allows for a
much more rapid exchange than text. A quick 1-5 minute phone call can be far
_less_ interruptive than a 15 minute sequence of texts or IMs.

Sometimes, as well, it's simply nice, or the right thing, to talk to someone.

I feel _no_ obligation to respond to and/or pick up any given communication
from a stranger. Family, friends, and co-workers are generally given a much
higher priority (though not absolute).

------
mcmire
Read the blog post that this post links to first, as it goes into more depth.
I like the idea of the "slow web". That author, Jack Cheng, is exactly right
about how we consume services. In this day and age of real-time updates and so
forth, we are being pushed around against our will by technology. And at the
end of the day, it means nothing. The idea of the slow web, it seems to me, is
the idea that we have control -- over when we would like to get notifications,
over when we want to respond, take action. We have control, because it's a
tool instead of a slot machine. And that's what we should be designing
technology to be.

~~~
stcredzero
One thing we should ask: Do the people who let themselves be pushed around by
data somehow "win" in some way? This would explain why the phenomenon persists
even though it has downsides. How would we provide that benefit without the
downside?

~~~
slurgfest
There are a bunch of things going on here simultaneously and it may help to
separate some of them -

one is the difference between people being pushed around by realtime, vs.
people having aggregators and agents consuming realtime - the human does not
need to be glued to the screen to benefit from the feed. But if there is no
realtime feed then this is not possible.

So if the slow web is about having control, then having access to realtime
updates may be important to the slow web... odd as that might sound.

~~~
stcredzero
Corollary: the future is about sophisticated data tools for individuals.

------
mdonahoe
"With all of this content vying for our attention at virtually every hour of
the day, I believe the future is not real-time."

"You should follow me on Twitter here."

~~~
davedx
I think there's a name for that kind of logical fallacy but I'm not sure what
it is.

Did you expect the people who invented Facebook and Twitter to turn off their
cell phones?

~~~
galactus
"Tu quoque"

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque>

------
bialecki
Real-time is just a feature and it's here to stay. The problem is the amount
of data available has exploded and the algorithms to sort/filter that data
haven't caught up yet. But they will.

Take, for example, Facebook Top News. The benefit isn't that it's not real
time, it's just that the algorithm for deciding what's top news isn't driven
primarily by the post timestamp. In the future defaulting to Top News makes
sense, but there's no reason that feed shouldn't be real-time. If a close
friend gets engaged, I would want a notification about that as soon as
possible. But I want Facebook to be smart about when it interrupts me.

The same is true for Twitter's weekly digest. I'd love to have the tweets
Twitter picks out in real-time rather than only at the end of the week. I may
not want to be notified in real time, but I wouldn't mind if they went in a
special list I could browse every day. Basically whatever metrics Twitter uses
to decide what are the best tweets for me, I want those applied is real-time,
and when a story meets the threshold, let me know.

~~~
davedx
Yes, I agree this is what we should be working towards.

I use Facebook's 'starred friend' feature and that's helped a lot to filtering
which updates I want to see. It's still not nearly custom enough though - it
would be nice if I could rank 'event types' and 'friend-to-friend connection
strength' myself to help the filtering a lot more. I always feel as if the
automatic filtering in Top News is too general (i.e. based on update
views/number of replies), instead of being specific to me.

------
pixie_
I'm wondering how old the poster is because the future is of communication is
probably going to be a lot more similar to how teenagers communicate today.
The rest of us old people will continue to feel more alienated and
overwhelmed. He very well may have predicted the future of old people
communication. Similar to how we give simple cellphones to old people today so
they don't freak out.

~~~
laurenproctor
He's 23.

~~~
dredmorbius
Over the hill.

------
rfreebern
There's a lot of back-and-forth in this discussion about whether real-time
communication is good or bad, and whether the responsibility for dealing with
it lies with the content producer or the end user. I think the optimal
solution lies somewhere in the middle: content producers need to be respectful
of users' limitations (time, energy, attention, etc.) and users have to
understand and communicate those limitations. Real-time communication is
merely a tool, and like any other, it can be used well (for things like
important events that are occurring now) or poorly (because who really needs
to know instantly when an acquaintance listens to a new dubstep remix?).

The concept of the Slow Web is catching on precisely because, as technology
has matured, the idea of real-time communications has become the default, and
as a result, using nearly any service exposes you to a bombardment of
information. Technologically, it's easy: something happens, so you immediately
fire off an email or trigger a push notification. Why wait? Why bother
implementing a queue or a summary when it's so simple to just do it now?

Yes, users can always opt out, but often doing so means you either have to opt
out of the service entirely (thereby losing the ability to benefit from it at
all) or that the service falls out of your consciousness because they have no
setting between "firehose" and "off", and there are so many other things
demanding your attention.

Especially when services are ad-driven, they want to find ways to keep getting
your attention. Every time they notify you of an update and you load the page,
that's an ad impression. Every time you're prompted to share something and it
gets a friend of yours to sign up, that's a new data point for advertisers.
They have a vested interest in pulling your attention away from whatever
you're doing and back to themselves, and real-time communication makes that
easier.

You can choose to ignore notifications or put them off until later, but the
fact that they're sitting there with unread information is often difficult to
ignore. The fear of missing out drives us to keep checking; the fact that
every fifth or eighth or twelfth tweet makes us laugh or think is partial
reinforcement that drives us to try to read every one. Opting out through
willpower alone is more difficult than it seems for most people.

------
absolute-ly
This little note seems quite narrow minded.

Who says communication has to go over the web?

When I send a message or some other data to someone, like when I send
something via FedEx, I'd like to know how long it's going to take to arrive.
If it can be instantaneous, all the better. When the recipient chooses to read
it is their business.

Real-time communications systems are quite valuable, in my opinion. Financial
markets now rely on them.

But what I'd really like to see are more real-time operating systems for
general use, by consumers. A real-time kernel makes computing very
predictable. The time taken to complete a task can be accurately estimated
before it is undertaken. Sometimes this is very useful. Sometimes the user
might only want to do one or more single things at a time. Maybe there's a
task I perform everyday and I want to be sure it will always take the same
amount of time, each and every day.

In the real world, outside of computers, everyone knows "multitasking" is
overrated. If you want results, it's better to be able to _focus_.

Maybe we might say the same for computers, in some situations.

~~~
icebraining
_Who says communication has to go over the web?_

I don't know, who?

 _When I send a message or some other data to someone, like when I send
something via FedEx, I'd like to know how long it's going to take to arrive.
If it can be instantaneous, all the better._

Why? Why do you care? As long as it arrives before the recipient can actually
handle it, isn't it irrelevant?

 _Real-time communications systems are quite valuable, in my opinion.
Financial markets now rely on them._

With disastrous consequences, some would claim.

Re:RTOS. The only thing it buys you is submillisecond scheduling, vs standard
Linux millisecond scheduling. It doesn't mean the system is single-task, nor
does it protect the task from being delayed by doing IO, which almost all
tasks do (and if they connect to the internet, you can forget any kind of hard
or soft realtime guarantees).

 _In the real world, outside of computers, everyone knows "multitasking" is
overrated. If you want results, it's better to be able to _focus_._

For the most part, multitasking is not the problem. Application design and
dependency on external systems is much more important. What's the point of
having a single task running, if it's waiting e.g. for the DNS to resolve?

------
dfj225
I think there's an interesting distinction between real-time from the point of
view of the user and the technology/systems providing data to the user. I
agree that in the future, communication services will be less real-time,
allowing users to focus their attention on the task at hand rather than the
distraction that is the latest email/text message/tweet.

However, I believe the systems that do handle this communications data will
need to be increasingly real-time. There will be so much data that unless it
is indexed and collated in real-time, it will be impossible to perform queries
to sort through mountains of un-indexed data. I think computers will become
more like intelligent agents, bringing things that require immediate action to
our attention and filing/organizing everything else for our later consumption.

There are already services, such as News.me and Prismatic, providing these
services for Twitter. In the future, I expect the idea behind these services
to be closer to the norm rather than the exception they are today.

------
goblin89
There seem to be an assumption that the prevention of distraction and
“overcommunication” could only be made via technical means.

> On a daily basis, we’re exposed to hundreds of articles, tweets, emails and
> advertisements <…> > We will find ways to artificially stem the constant
> flow of information through algorithmic summarization

It may be bad wording or misunderstanding, but I don't think we _get_ exposed
to it by some external force. There's a conscious decision one can make: which
sources to check? how often? what to ignore?

I don't think the existence of technical tools and filtering algorithms would
eliminate the need for these decisions.

------
state
Ways to control the flow of data rely on that data being there in the first
place. I'm not sure what you mean by 'many technology pundits', so I don't
know what you're referencing — but my impression of the recent debate has to
do with the importance of the infrastructure not the quality of the tools.
Clearly we need better tools, but they can't exist without the data itself.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I believe there's a fundamental tension between generating data in real-time
and consuming information. The author is correct in thinking more focus is
given to generating data compared to the effort in turning it into relevant,
consumable information.

------
Gambit89
Similar sentiments were expressed here (I can't find tbe HN discussion
though):

<http://mattogle.com/archivefever/>

------
weazl
There is a world of difference between push notifications and a service that
presents a real time view of some state.

------
gojomo
_[T]he future is not real-time. Instead, we will find ways to artificially
stem the constant flow of information through algorithmic summarization. We
will find ways to bring information we are truly interested in back to us at a
pace and time that is more manageable. Instant notifications will be reserved
for those few precious individuals and apps that absolutely need our
attention, rather than those that simply want it._

I agree, and expect the retreat-from-realtime to be fed both by technological
innovations -- better ways to reorganize, filter, and reprioritize -- and by a
cultural maturation/backlash.

Those services that "simply want" our attention, and use interface patterns to
trick us into giving them incrementally more of it, will be recognized as
abusive. Even the traditional reverse-chronological timeline, by its mixing of
wildly different (and often repetitive) messages, tends to falsely signal more
importance/urgency/novelty than is actually present. It's been an easy and
familiar bit of interface 'sugar', but in the wiser future we may consider it
as tacky as tabloid front-pages and cable/headline-news teasers.

------
gall
The automatically appended "You should follow me on twitter _here_" is a great
punchline.

------
dylanhassinger
slow web ftw

