I think that the olfactory metaphor is an interesting one though, since dogs actually have this amplified sense, and it would also be hard for us to imagine going from two eyeballs to 300… (perhaps a dragonfly’s vision would be more apt?).

Anyway, we’re still going to need better systems to augment the limited gray matter systems we have, and the only way for them to be better than Clippy, in my estimation, is through [social] network effects.

I’m just happy to hear any discussion about the web (real-time or otherwise) that even HINTS at the notion of hard cognitive limits. No matter how much we like to think we’re being rewired, there’s only so much plasticity between our ears.

I will say, however, that we ALREADY possess a tool that dramatically increases the speed with which we can process information. It’s called… visuals. A picture is worth 1024 words and all that. While not *everything* can be represented graphically, it’s no secret that our brains are highly tuned for taking in and filtering far more visual info than, say, processing written words.

And while it’s always been true that visuals usually make communication more efficient and effective, the ability to represent data, info, and knowledge in graphic/visual ways is a skill the real-time web will demand of us all.

Humans are actually quite good at processing vast amounts of visual information in a live stream. Just like dogs are at smelling things out. We maneuver complex visual environments all the time whenever we’re out wandering through large crowds in a big city, or navigating terrain while hiking through a natural environment.

The problem is that there hasn’t been enough commercial work in 2D animated interfaces for the mainstream because it is expensive and difficult. And the processing power of our hardware is just now becoming sufficient for this to work.

What we now need are visionaries that work on these next generation animated interfaces and the frameworks to generate them. It is tempting to move to 3D right away, but I believe we need to first understand how 2D animations and simulations can be harnessed to achieve a higher bandwidth interface.

We’ve all seen those 2D interfaces in sci-fi flicks. Now just imagine using them to visualize and navigate the real-time web. That’s one part of what Web 3.0 will be about. I believe with newer, faster browsers and HTML5 you will see this happen in the very near future.

I’m thinking that the importance of the Real-Time Web is not so much to give a normal human being a rapid stream of content/headlines/messages to stare at and more to feed the intelligent filters so that the most appropriate and legitimate content bubble back up and come into view for us.

You’ve touched on this. So this is just my way of saying it I suppose.

I usually refer to Stocks and Flows which was written about in 2004 by Lee Lefever. I’ll comment further on my blog – http://vocal.ly/pd1

My personal feeling is (at the moment) that aggregators like Gist and the like will play a big role in assisting us with classifying and interpreting the information on the realtime stream by permitting us to deal with it on our own terms. The primary thing that I’m now thinking though is, man, Chris is right Halo (or any FPS) would be pretty lame if we applied previously well understood paradigms for game playing to it (say a board game for instance).

So given that the best way to deal with the streamlining the information of the realtime web is in realtime, we have very interesting times ahead.

I’m off now to check out the links you reference in the article.

I guess it’s time for the realtime web to “break out of the page” as it were, or more importantly time for us to embrace the fact that it already has.

Great post! Excellent that you picked up on social-search-ala-Aardvark as a kind of filter from information overload. Aardvark is all about having the machine do what the machine does well (eg, index lots of information to route questions quickly), and having the human do what the human does well (eg, focus attention on another human, and give a helpful sympathetic answer). And everything we do follows a heavily user-driven design process, so we’re explicitly attending to the vagaries of human cognition and social psychology in the virtual wild.

The one thread you didn’t pick up on in your piece though was the genetic side: the fabulous Alexandra Horowitz is my sister! It’s no coincidence that Aardvark was originally founded as “The Mechanical Zoo”, bringing up a suite of animal-inspired projects

Cheers,

- Damon Horowitz

Co-Founder and CTO, Aardvark