Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Social networks are going to be redefined.

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids. Read the rest of this entry »

A snapshot from Pepsi's real-time keyword swarm from SXSW

Take half of Twitter’s activity base, bring them together and you have SXSW.  This group of people are just some of the many that are driving what we will all know as the real-time web.  To the left you can see a screen shot I took this morning from a real-time keyword swarm driven by Twitter and SXSW attendees (compliments of Phil’s Pharmacy).

Twitter has been the source of many of these popups.  You can find a real-time evolving tag cloud of what’s popular right now, or if you are a finance junkie like me, get bleeding edge news and opinion on every stock in your portfolio.  Real-time updates on the real-time web anyone?  Finally, bring them all together on your desktop with TweetDeck.

Bringing it all together with TweetDeck

Facebook has jumped on the boat as well with the recent updates to user’s profile pages.  The emphasis has moved solely to the latest updates from your friends. Video sharing site UStream.tv has pushed the envelope by offering free streaming of live video to anyone.

Facebook's recent changes to promote real-time activity

Internet users are being groomed to have an expectation of receiving information as it is generated.  In an age where e-mail is the new snail mail, could a start-up with a decent semantics engine make Reuters tremble?