the onda

Back in 1999 there was this dot-com company called Third Voice that was the first Internet 1.0 attempt at providing "co-presence" as you surfed on Internet pages. The idea was to use the content of the web as a substrate for building real-time communities where people could interact by "chatting" on top of pages. Needless to say, the concept did not catch on in any meaningful way, and to this day, many Firefox extensions and widgets later (even Flickr 0.1 was just a rehash for photos of this co-presence idea), we're still not there. I'm almost ready to call it and assert that the notion of a layer of people interacting in real time on top of the more slowly moving content of the web is just not likely to be a mode of interaction that will ever catch on. IM is for realtime, Second Life is for realtime— but the venerable and scaleable web— even with its rapidly accelerating update cycle (fueled by wikis, blogs, and microblogs) is just fine without it.

Except of course that every once in a while I experience a content consumption craving that leaves me thinking about the promise of the Third Voices of the world. For instance, today, on the most momentous product launch of 2007, I am sitting thousands of miles away on vacation in Barbados, feeling very far from it all. I'm not sure that I'd be standing in one of the lengthy queues encircling each and every Apple store in the US (though I might be), but I would definitely love to get a better feel than what I can get from the blog coverage, Twitter updates, and occasional big-time journalist dispatch.

A few brave folks are trying video steaming but it isn't working well (because of the lame reason that the multiplexers don't seem to be able to take the load), and the Engadgets of the world are doing a nice job of the constant update to keep feeding us photos.

But overall, cobbling these bits and pieces together is a pretty dissatisfying experience. What I want sort of like Techmeme (who has the right starting approach to this) but faster moving, more tunable to my network of people, and way richer in terms of the multimedia being shared. Discoverable through Google— in fact maybe even promotable through Google, and capable of taking user comments, photos, and videos all one one page and with adequate peak-load capacity planning.

It's not clear to me why this hasn't emerged yet as a sort of web platform for events. It could be used extensively at conferences and then brought out for product launches, political events, even disasters. What is more, it is clear that various folks are bumping around its edges: from the Facebook news feed to the Twitter update, all of the leading-edge social platform experiments are feeling various parts of the elephant in the dark. And eventually I suppose, something might emerge from all of this experimentation that will finally deliver the live web we need to cover these types of things.

In the meanwhile, I'll be clicking refresh on apple.com...