The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side attention economics

Re:The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side... by wallflower on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @11:27AM (#919614)

Back in January, a guy at the coworking space I was at that day announced that a plane had crashed into the Hudson. We were like - what? He said his girlfriend worked in a building overlooking the Hudson and saw it - and instant messaged him via AIM - and we tried to verify it. It seemed so out there. A plane in the Hudson?!

Twitter didn't have any info on Flight 1549 for a minute or so. In fact, the real time Summize search engine backend - seemed to be lagging in its indexing that morning. CNN and the other news networks were still reporting the same political/celebrity news of the moment.

Personal word of mouth just barely beats Twitter for real-time* information but it's very close. It's true crowd-sourcing (though questionable why people will tweet they are in an earthquake while it's happening - and not be safer).

* - My hardware/software RT engineer friends scoff at the mis-use of the RT term.

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Re:The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side... by absconditus on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @12:03PM (#919725)

What is the value to knowing this information as soon as possible?

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Re:The questionable value of the real-time web - Demand-side... by wallflower on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @05:42AM (#921450)

Excellent question. I can't think of a good answer. I originally thought it was about ego (e.g. knowing about something quicker than the general public). However, I think, personally, it's more about being able to observe an event from the distance of a first-person third-party (#lessconf is a great example) as the event unfolds (in, yes, "real-time") The thirst to acquire knowledge/news without the cost of having to actually have a personal or even virtual relationship with those sharing.

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