The End of the Realtime Experiment

About two months ago, I redesigned this site as a stream of all my internet interactions across the different social media services; Twitter, FriendFeed, Disqus, etc. I fully immersed myself in the realtime web, and spent a lot of time learning to swim. It's still available here.

I've changed this site back because I've come to some conclusions about the realtime web:

1. It's a great tool for companies to connect with certain segments of their customer base. Those customers may not be necessarily broadly representative, but they are vocal and reasonably clear about what they want.
2. For the rest of us, its signal-to-noise ratio makes it entertainment. (Like cable news programs, it's entertainment disguised as useful information.)

Creating meaningful value requires thought and contemplation. Those things take time, and realtime media just doesn't allow for enough of it. I'm finding the yield is way better if I just read the really good daily (or weekly) blogs, the comments of great online communities, and skim a few high-volume aggregation sites. And then spend time thinking about what I've read!

After all, technology may be accelerating our ability to communicate, but our broken hardware only runs so fast.