
The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What's Next - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/05/01/01readwriteweb-the-man-who-made-gmail-says-real-time-conve-12208.html
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mynameishere
Real time conversations are _so_ 50,000 BC - 1970 AD

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catone
This was already on HN when it was on RWW a couple of days ago. ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589049>

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pj
Do you think you could measure something by the frequency of reposts? There
must be some function with a component of memory and freshness of content that
could tell us something about the course of a news aggregator.

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ivankirigin
It could just be the lag between syndicating RWW to the NYT.

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pj
It's like meme travel. How do we measure the velocity of a meme? We'd have to
get the position and ..?

Can meme's have a location? Would it be some aggregate of its locations in the
minds of those conscious of its existence?

It definitely tells us something about the relationship between populations of
social networks. NYT, RRW, HN and they cross into physical realms as well and
those take time to print and move between physical bodies.

So this goes back to the disappearance of technology because as time
approaches infinity, meme velocity approaches the speed of light due to the
increasing transparency of the technology medium, like light in a vacuum is
the fastest it can go.

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bkrausz
Unless I'm mistaken, long polling is not a new concept, as this article
says...it's been around for quite a while.

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kwamenum86
Yeah...pb did not invent long polling. It also goes by the names reverse-AJAX
and Comet and has actually been around for quite a while.

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cookiecaper
Indeed, the concepts of Instant Messaging and Aggregation are revolutionary
and have no known widely-used implementations.

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jacktang
Real-Time is next big thing, not only for conversation.

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pj
as time approaches infinity, the opacity of the layer between the digital
world and the analog (biological/evolutionary) world approaches zero.

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smanek
?

Maybe I'm being a bit dim, but I have no idea what that means. Care to expand?

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pj
what andreyf said.

In longer words, what I meant was that as technology advances, we are going to
see less and less of the distinction between it and our own skin, or our own
blood. Our blood may not even be what we think of blood today, but a synthetic
blend of water, nutrients, gases, hormones, protiens, and other items that our
bodies need.

For example, there was a time when everyone wore spectacles. That technology
that improved the wearers' vision was obvious and on the face. Now some people
wear contacts, which most of the time are invisible except to the wearer. In
the future, our eyes will be replaced with advanced photo optics, night
vision, and a frame storage rate much higher than our minds can currently
comprehend. We'll play it back like Tivo today, which will also be a thing of
the past as well. We'll just play movies on our mind.

The goal of the technology is to make itself invisible -- an intangible
benefit to the quality of life. The kind of quality you just "get" but don't
have to quantify, because it is transparent.

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pg
Buckminster Fuller wrote about this. He called it etherealization.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherealization>

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pj
I never realized how interesting he is until just now. :D

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andreyf
Hm, then in that sense, FF is more of a competitor to HN or Reddit than it is
for Twitter. Never thought of it that way, but it makes sense...

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vicaya
Real time conversation/communication is overrated and has much lower S/N ratio
than async email/comment etc.

