The Instant Web (Just Add Now)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Slightlynorth

My not so accurate radar is being tickled by some recent emerging technologies that some Big Shot may place as the next incremental digit following “Web”. Submitted for your approval, Mr Serling:

A lot of talk of “real time search”
The whole crazy growth of Twitter, Facebook, etc — built on answering the deep philosophical question– what are you doing NOW?
Waiting for the Google Wave to land on shore — more promise of the web being not a pile of linked documents but a networked of linked flowing communications.

One more today- I caught Joss Winn’s tweet about WordPress.com’s new experiment in Real Time Blogs:

At im.wordpress.com we have been experimenting with instant delivery of blog posts and comments. Now you can subscribe to WordPress.com blogs in your Jabber IM client and receive posts and comments the instant they are published. It is also possible to post to blogs from the chat client. In time we plan to add these real-time features to web pages. Soon the conversations on blogs will be as fast as chat rooms.

I’m still fuzzy on what all this means– but it feels like a Wave like layer where two way communication can happen between a blog (or its comments) and for now, a simple chat client, but eventually I guess other sysems.

I was able in a few minutes to set up my iChat client to communicate via Jabber to the im.wordpress.com server. For now, you can use it to communicate with a WordPress.com site, so I set it to subscribe to my CogDpgPhotoBlog http://cogdog.wordpress.com/ as well as comments.

Nothing happened.

Of course, because there were no changes.

But later today, when I posted a new photo to this blog from Twitter, immediately I got an IM:

I’m still trying to grasp how this might be used, but this is not the end functionality– it is showing the basic simple communication channel (chat) to send notifications as well as commands back that I can issue.

There seems to be a lot of “real-time” stuff percolating out there.