The community of people using foursquare is growing rapidly and nowhere is this more readily apparent than right here in our lovely Slovenia.

Back when I first started using foursquare for some strange reason (I honestly don’t know) pretty much everywhere you went you were forced to first add the location. Then check-in. And you were seen as this strange voodoo magician with a funky thing that  tells everyone where they are.

However since my first check-in at Hekovnik on the 27th of January this year a lot has changed. Nowadays anywhere I want to check-in the place is already available and what’s more, someone’s a mayor! Hell, just the other day I even noticed some sort of location-based advertising. That was a real shocker to be honest.

But the biggest question on everyone’s mind is: What the hell is the use here? Why am I doing this? Why do I keep checking-in everywhere I go? What possible reason could there be for publishing my location on the internets shy of wanting to get raped?

Two months ago I thought I had the answer: Electronic Graffiti

And sure enough, foursquare can indeed be used as a medium for electronically leaving a mark on places you visit. Everyone who checks-in somewhere near will see what you wrote and will wonder “Who was that guy. What was he doing here. I wonder if he liked soup”

But I soon grew weary of that. Half of the time I couldn’t think of anything whimsical to say and the other half my phone lagged and spazzed out and before I could leave a note for the world to see I felt like bashing my face in with the frustration.

So that can’t possibly be the usefulness.

Then last weekend as I was checking-in on yet another hill in the middle of nowhere a moment of clarity strook me.

Birdwatching! Trainspotting!

Foursquaring is as much a silly hobby as birdwatching or trainspotting! Back in the old days people would travel far and wide to put a check next to a colourful picture in a book, or to cross off a number in a long list of numbers inside a fat notepad of numbers.

These days, we travel far and wide to put a virtual mark on a virtual medium inside a virtual network. All we want is to go “Hey, I’ve been there and that’s great.”

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Remember the days when the modern internet was new and everyone and their dog had a blog they were writing several times a week, if not every day?

Around 2004 blogs suddenly became incredibly mainstream due to their involvement in several political events and some other shady things that happened. If you’re really interested in this bit of history there is a wonderful wikipedia page about the history of blogging.

Personally I was a little late to that revolution having made my first blog post (that still exists) on the 21st of April 2006. My god I felt like I was discovering a whole new world of possibilities! And I was, I really was, it was around that time that the Slovene blogging community started really taking shape and I was following oh so many blogs. Most incredibly bad, some very very good. We even had a conference for bloggers or two, think they were called Blogres.

But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Fast forward into the present time.

Lately what I’ve been noticing is that it’s getting harder and harder to blog even a few times a week. Just blinking my eyes and completing a TODO or two and whoosh, a whole week has passed and my personal blog doesn’t update.

What’s stranger still is that I’ve been noticing this in my RSS aggregator as well! I have a folder specifically for personal blogs, which I define as blogs written by people for the people with no particular reason. Mostly about their life or some especially interesting thing they want to say.

These blogs, and I only followed about ten back then, used to be a daily chore. Nowadays as few as 20 posts accumulate over the course of a week and I’m following around thirty blogs.

My hypothesis as to why this is happening is that people have switched to Twitter and Facebook for their personal expression needs. Because they are tweeting tens of messages every day, they simply run out of things to say on their blogs. It makes sense really, after you’ve told everyone every minute idea that pops into your head, what else is there to say on your blog?

What do you think, is real-time chatting killing the need for personal blogging?

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When we first started the Preona project one of our most important assumptions was that actively liking things is very cumbersome and few people will want to do it in order to personalise the reading suggestion system.

What we wanted to build was a system that could automagically learn from what the user is doing, be intriguingly implicit and invisible.

This was wrong.

After observing what people are doing online and how they behave, we, or rather I, have come to the conclusion that liking is a very important action that transcends cultural and technological bounds. And that people do it for everything but improving the ratings of what they’re reading.

The reason people like liking things is simple: Feedback.

And I don’t mean giving feedback to developers, or recommendation systems. No, they’re giving feedback on a completely personal level. The act of liking things online has gained a significant cultural and sociological dimension – it’s a lot like giving flowers to people, the meaning depends wholly on the context.

But this makes the whole act very difficult to interpret and base your machine learning systems on. When the context defines the action’s meaning, rather than the action itself that’s a very big problem. Sure, in general you can assume that liking means people would like to read more of that particular content, but what about when they’re just expressing agreement, or mutual dislike of something? Or expressing condolences? Nobody wants to read a lot of sad things …

This sounds like a very difficult problem to solve, but perhaps the solution is incredibly simple.

Implement liking as a purely conversational feature and ignore it completely from a machine learning perspective? I don’t know, we’re going to have to try and see what works best.

An interesting experiment would be to try predicting whether a person will “like” something with Google‘s new prediction API. This probably calls for a weekend project, hopefully I’ll have a chance to play with that in the following days and try it out.

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Yesterday I read an interesting post about the speed at which information travels between two nodes in a network. It was about a so called Data Singularity and the basic premise was that nowadays information flows are so horribly fast that only computers talking to computers can handle the stream at all and that humans are even less than mediaries, but can only really comprehend meta-meta-data.

To recap the changing history of what the concept of “real-time” information means (btw this is a talk I was supposed to have at WebCampLj last month but then lost the artistic inspiration):

• there was once a time when any news that came to the listener in a week was considered real-time information, depending on how far away the event was (snail mail)
• then real-time became the speed of light with human routers (telegraph, early telephone)
• real-time then became instant, but not constant (phone, TV etc.)

But right now we are in a world where there is an instant and constant global conversation going on. Everybody is multicasting, if not downright broadcasting, very many random thoughts that pop into their heads. People are having conversations all over the place and it’s all right there; always.

Hell, even Google has decided to start thinking about something as horrible as real-time RSS feeds by integrating pubsubhubbub into their Reader.

It’s almost as if the whole world is conspiring against the lonely infonaut who just wants to be able to do something while still getting all the information they crave so deeply. I’m not sure where I’ve read it or how far ago, but it was something along the lines of the average person these days being completely and totally addicted to information and that this addiction is made worse than heroin by the simple fact society expects it.

That is to say, if you’re not addicted to information, you’re being quite odd and strange.

But where does this attitude lead us?

There are 25 million tweets made every day, that is to say 289 tweets EVERY FUCKING SECOND! Even if you follow a very small subset of those people, that still makes at least 10 tweets every minute!

Count RSS feeds into that … Reader already pushes updates to the interface so very real-time that when I click “mark all as read” there are usually 5 new items waiting for me in the time it takes for the interface to clear. Yes, it’s That Bad(tm). Considering that following only a handful of RSS feeds (about 100) means I personally get on average 500 to 600 new articles every day … yeah, that makes one article every two bloody minutes!

And they want to make that process even faster.

So essentially, as an infonaut, the internet expects me to read twenty tweets and one long-ish article every two minutes of my day. And that’s not even counting E-Mail, Facebook, Forums and a bunch of other things.

Just to give you a sense of how little two minutes is: It takes three minutes to steep a cup of tea.

Now obviously I am quite incapable of processing information constantly, all day, at a rate of at least 240-ish words per minute. For a little sense of what this means, the world record for typing is 150 words per minute sustained over 50 minutes.

Yeah that’s right, those very very crazy typists that type so fast it looks like magic … type much much slower than you are expected to read these days.

Quite apparent to anyone paying attention is that this situation is very unsustainable and people saying that “Oh you can just take an hour every day and skim through the titles of everyting” are downright bollocking crazy! What can be done is a matter of long debate, what will be done remains to be seen.

But something has got to be done ’cause this is insane.

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Yesterday someone asked me a surprising question: How do you define real-time?

Perhaps more surprising is that I had no idea how to answer it! Uhm, ah, eeeh, hmmm … fuck, what IS real-time?

And it got me thinking. Well, ok, in real life we define real-time as the instant reaction from physical interactions between objects. Throw a ball at the wall and it will bounce back in real-time. Smash a photon into a metal and electrons fly out in real time. Go very very fast and … no wait, time gets very complicated in relativistic physics, let’s not go there.

But in communication real-time is defined a bit differently. When you shout at someone to stop being so loud with the jack hammer, if they respond within a few seconds. That’s real-time. When you tell someone to do the dishes, if they grunt within a minute, that’s real-time. When you call someone in the phone you don’t even notice them up to a few seconds delay (tested this myself, it’s weird). When transmitting video you’d rather drop a frame than have the video seem to lock-up for even a fraction of a second. This is real-time.

And that’s before we even get into the time it takes our brains to process audio signals, transform them into language, parse the language and access any memories needed to form understanding.

In electronics real-time are responses that happen within a few nanoseconds, for the really hardcore amongst hardware people even that is a bit too slow. When booting a desktop computer everything under 10 seconds is bloody real-time.

So what gives? How can we talk about the real-time web, already even about the steps beyond real-time, when we obviously have no clue what real-time actually means?

The answer is that we. Do. Not. Care.

Are you with me?

There is no need to define what real-time means because on the web there is no real-time. There isn’t even any expectation of real-time. The real-time web isn’t about how long updates take to reach us. It’s not about how long we have to stare at the screen to find a response. It’s a very technological concept.

The real-time web is simply how we choose to label interfaces that do not require refreshing a website to sync its data with the server. It means that whenever the server finds out something new, we are notified at the same moment or a fraction of a second away from that moment.

Now granted as far as most of the web goes this is a very big revolution. But IM has had this ability for well over a decade. We just needed a way to push it onto this archane technology called a Web Browser and that other archane technology called a HTTP protocol, not to mention the whole Client-Server set up we’ve got going.

There is nothing wrong with this, don’t get me wrong, I love real-time updated websites and I seriously do not care how real-time the information is. Anything with a resolution smaller than a minute is fine for me, I’m swamped as it is.

But don’t you think we’re beating a dead horse with a stick here? Peer to peer is a much better backbone for doing these sorts of things, HTTP and the web were never meant to do this and as long as we continue tacking on gizmos and doodads we’re just making everything a little bit worse. The web is already a duct tape job, let’s give her a chance and, you know, introduce some proper behind the scenes remarkable innovation for this real-time web thing. I would love to see that.

What do you think the real-time web is?