Real-Time vs. Relevance: The Future of the World and the Web

By the end of this year, half of the people on earth will have a cell phone. I have already stated on this blog that I believe personal mobile broadcasting (everyday people sharing information from their cell phones) will change the world.

How it will change the world is an intriguing question. The internet has been abuzz lately with talk of the "real-time web." You may think the web is a really fast-paced place, and of course it is. But it's not instant. In the past news has taken a while to get around the internet. Many services (like Google search) receive information by regularly checking websites for updates, and the time between checks keeps information from being immediately available.

This is changing. Social services like Twitter, Facebook, and others operate in real-time. When something happens, you can update these online apps immediately with your cell phone. Increasingly this instant information is becoming searchable. I have often used Twitter's search function to find up-to-the-second information. For instance, when Gmail went down a few weeks ago, I wanted to know if it was just me or if everyone was experiencing an outage. It takes quite a while for bloggers to write about a topic like this and for Google to index their blogs and report this information in its search results. Not so for Twitter search. One quick "gmail down" query and I knew it was a huge problem. I could see the hundreds of new "tweets" arriving on the issue every minute.

What concerns me about the real-time web is that perhaps we are focusing on a small problem (speed) while ignoring a bigger one: relevance. Here is a quote from blogger Nik Fletcher:

...In an age where we're seemingly drawn to 'first' instead of 'better' with the news, I can't help but feel we ought to be looking at relevancy, not real-time.

I agree. What about signal-to-noise ratio? How do we ensure that the onslaught of real-time information is actually information we want? How do we keep from just creating a newer, dumber form of television?

This proved to be a big problem this summer for the famous Iranian protesters who used Twitter to tell the world the injustices taking place in their country. It turns out, according to this story in Businessweek, that very few Iranians actually twittered about the protests. The vast majority of the tweets came from people outside the country tweeting and re-tweeting about the situation. Actual organization of and information about the protests spread in traditional ways -- word of mouth, over the phone, knocking on doors, and traditional journalism.

This is partly because governments have the power to shutdown internet forums like Twitter as they have done in Iran and China -- or use them for their own purposes. I recently watched this fascinating TED talk by Evgeny Morozov about the flawed assumption that technology inherently gives way to democracy, liberty, and freedom from oppression. Morozov makes some great points about how dictatorships are able to use social media to their own ends. Check it out if you're interested:

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships

This is not to say I think real-time, personal, mobile broadcasting is doomed. Quite the contrary, I think there is great evidence that it will bring about positive change. But I think we need to remember relevance. How can we ensure that information coming along real-time channels is authentic? Who created it? Where were they located? What is its source? Most importantly, is it information we want? Is it valuable?

Please note that Twitter is currently answering these questions, well, poorly. A recent report labeled 40% of tweets "pointless babble." Most of its users have never tweeted and don't follow anyone. Companies like Philtro are already devising ways to tune down the noise in Twitter.

This is only the beginning of mobile broadcasting, but as we move forward I think we need to keep our eyes open for ideas that concentrate on providing relevant as well as real-time information, so we may arrive in a future with less noise and more insight. I'll leave you with another TED talk which highlights a mobile-web-based, crowdsource system that was able to amass helpful, useful information. Blogger Erik Hersman has created a platform called Ushahidi which allowed Kenyans to report and track violence during the 2008 elections. He believes this technology saved lives, and will continue to do so as it evolves.

Erik Hersman on reporting crisis via texting