From Pages to Streams
Thought provoking article on Techcrunch about the shift from dedicated web pages to real-time streams.
“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”
This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos and videos.
The author presents a coherent stream metaphor: “A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information - that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.” He claims that the stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them:
“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”
“The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:
This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.”
This is where I have to somewhat disagree. Yes, the average user must deal with information overload more than ever. Our emphasis must not be focused towards this notion of “giving up” or realizing that we can ‘never master the stream’. We need to build smart filtering mechanisms that help us navigate this overload and data-heavy information ether. We need to build systems that help us know when and where we *should* hop into the stream. We need to be able to set and identify levels of immediacy - I am not willing to miss out on any content from my closest friends, but will easily let other content slide by. Why can I not easily set preferences across the board and am constantly prompted to setup less-than ideal preferences within walled gardens?
“So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.”
The information overload “problem” is that of smart filtering, and in a way, the article’s last sentence portrays one of the most promising filtering mechanisms - social & collaborative. By letting people you trust around you do some of the work, it becomes much easier for users to take the plunge and step into the stream.
So start classifying y’all. I want to be able to finally deal with all my feeds!










