Many of you have probably heard that we launched YouTube RealTime today. There’s a good chance you heard as soon as the news broke, via some real-time mechanism like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook. And as you can probably guess by the fact I spent the last few months working on YouTube RealTime, I think the trend towards the real-time-ification of the web is a pretty exciting one. I even put together a VLAB event on this topic last year. Why do I think so?

  • There’s more and more ’stuff’ on the web, and we seem to have less and less time to pay attention to it.  Developing tools that can bring the important stuff to our attention as it happens seems like a good solution.  With the amount of new stuff created each day, most of us don’t have time to go back and catch up on old news – we have to digest it as it flys by.
  • In the same way ICQ was game-changing for me compared to email (wow, I can see which of my friends are online right now and talk to them in real time), tools that allow me to see all the activities our friends are doing right now (online and off) makes the whole experience feel much more immediate, social and real.

Overall, it seems that viral/feedback loops are getting shorter and shorter, and new technologies are spreading at exponentially incresing rates.  ‘Real-time’ is the limit of these trends, at least until we figure out how to break the speed of light :)  Clearly our next challenge, and one that many smart folks are already working on, is to figure out how to manage all this information bombarding us in real-time so that we maximize signal-to-noise.

Anyway, just wanted to write a short post to christen my new blog design (do ya like it?) and to pimp YouTube RealTime :) More soon.

R

P.S. YouTube RealTime is still in invite-only beta, so hit me up if you want an invite.