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Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web

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May 8, 2009

Welcome to The Stream

The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet's infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer.

And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is the next phase of the Internet's evolution. It's what comes after, or on top of, the Web we've all been building and using.

Perhaps the best and most current example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other microblogging tools. These services are visibly streamlike, their user-interfaces are literally streams; streams of ideas, thinking and conversation. In reaction to microblogs we are also starting to see the birth of new tools to manage and interact with these streams, and to help understand, search, and follow the trends that are rippling across them. Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service -- it's the collective movement that is taking place across them all.

To meet the challenges and opportunities of the Stream a new ecosystem of services is rapidly emerging: stream publishers, stream syndication tools, stream aggregators, stream readers, stream filters, real-time stream search engines, and stream analytics engines, stream advertising networks, and stream portals are emerging rapidly. All of these new services are the beginning of the era of the Stream.

Web History

The original Tim Berners-Lee proposal that started the Web was in March, 1989. The first two decades of the Web (Web 1.0 from 1989 - 1999, and Web 2.0 from 1999 - 2009) were focused on the development of the Web itself. Web 3.0 (2009 - 2019), the third-decade of the Web, officially began in March of this year and will be focused around the Stream.

 

  • In the 1990's with the advent of HTTP and HTML, the metaphor of "the Web" was born and concepts of webs and sites captured our imaginations.
  • In the early 2000's the focus shifted to graphs such as social networks and the beginnings of the Semantic Web.
  • Now, in the coming third decade, the focus is shifting to the Stream and with it, stream oriented metaphors of flows, currents, and ripples.

 

The Web has always been a stream. In fact it has been a stream of streams. Each site can be viewed as a stream of pages developing over time. Each page can be viewed as a stream of words, that changes whenever it is edited. Branches of sites can also be viewed as streams of pages developing in various directions.

But with the advent of blogs, feeds, and microblogs, the streamlike nature of the Web is becoming more readily visible, because these newer services are more 1-dimensional and conversational than earlier forms of websites, and they update far more frequently.

Defining the Stream

Just as the Web is formed of sites, pages and links, the Stream is formed of streams.

Streams are rapidly changing sequences of information around a topic. They may be microblogs, hashtags, feeds, multimedia services, or even data streams via APIs.

The key is that streams change often. This change is an important part of the value they provide (unlike static Websites, which do not necessarily need to change in order to provide value). In addition, it is important to note that streams have URI's -- they are addressable entities.

So what defines a stream versus an ordinary website?

  1. Change. Change is the key reason why a stream is valuable. That is not always so with a website.  Websites do not have to change at all to be valuable -- they could for example just be static but comprehensive reference library collections. But streams on the other hand change very frequently, and it is this constant change that is their main point.
  2. Interface Independence. Streams are streams of data, and they can be fully accessed and consumed independently of any particular user-interface -- via syndication of their data into various tools. Websites on the other hand, are only accessible via their user-interfaces. In the era of the Web the provider controlled the interface. In the new era of the stream, the consumer controls the interface. 
  3. Conversation is king. An interesting and important point is that streams are linked together not by hotlinks, but by acts of conversation -- for example, replies, "retweets," comments and ratings, and "follows." In the era of the Web the hotlink was king. But in the era of the Stream conversation is king.

 

In terms of structure, streams are comprised of agents, messages and interactions:

  • Agents are people as well as software apps that publish to streams.
  • Messages are publications by agents to streams -- for example, short posts to their microblogs.
  • Interactions are communication acts, such as sending a direct message or a reply, or quoting someone ("retweeting"), that connect and transmit messages between agents.

 

The Global Mind

If the Internet is our collective nervous system, and the Web is our collective brain, then the Stream is our collective mind. The nervous system and the brain are like the underlying hardware and software, but the mind is what the system is actually thinking in real-time. These three layers are interconnected, yet are distinctly different aspects, of our emerging and increasingly awakened planetary intelligence.

The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It's our collective stream of consciousness.

The Stream is the dynamic activity of the Web, unfolding over time. It is the conversations, the live streams of audio and video, the changes to Web sites that are happening, the ideas and trends -- the memes -- that are rippling across millions of Web pages, applications, and human minds.

The Now is Getting Shorter

The Web is changing faster than ever, and as this happens, it's becoming more fluid. Sites no longer change in weeks or days, but hours, minutes or even seconds. if we are offline even for a few minutes we may risk falling behind, or even missing something absolutely critical. The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our "now" is getting shorter.

The era of the Web was mostly about the past -- pages that were published months, weeks, days or at least hours before we looked for them. Search engines indexed the past for us to make it accessible: On the Web we are all used to searching Google and then looking at pages from the recent past and even farther back in the past. But in the era of the Stream, everything is shifting to the present -- we can see new posts as they appear and conversations emerge around them, live, while we watch.

Yet as the pace of the Stream quickens, what we think of as "now" gets shorter. Instead of now being a day, it is an hour, or a few minutes. The unit of change is getting more granular.

For example, if you monitor the public timeline, or even just your friends timeline in Twitter or Facebook you see that things quickly flow out of view, into the past. Our attention is mainly focused on right now: the last few minutes or hours. Anything that was posted before this period of time is "out of sight, out of mind."

The Stream is a world of even shorter attention spans, online viral sensations, instant fame, sudden trends, and intense volatility. It is also a world of extremly short-term conversations and thinking.

This is the world we may be entering. It is both the great challenge, and the great opportunity of the coming decade of the Web.

How Will We Cope With the Stream?

The Web has always been a stream -- it has been happening in real-time since it started, but it was slower -- pages changed less frequently, new things were published less often, trends developed less quickly. Today it is getting so much faster, and as this happens its feeding back on itself and we're feeding into it, amplifying it even more.

Things have also changed qualitatively in recent months. The streamlike aspects of the Web have really moved into the foreground of our mainstream cultural conversation. Everyone is suddenly talking about Facebook and Twitter. Celebrities. Talk show hosts. Parents. Teens.

And suddenly we're all finding ourselves glued to various activity streams, microblogging manically and squinting to catch fleeting references to things we care about as they rapidly flow by and out of view. The Stream has arrived.

But how can we all keep up with this ever growing onslaught of information effectively? Will we each be knocked over by our own personal firehose, or will tools emerge to help us filter our streams down to managable levels? And if we're already finding that we have too many streams today, and must jump between them ever more often, how will we ever be able to function with 10X more streams in a few years?

Human attention is a tremendous bottleneck in the world of the Stream. We can only attend to one thing, or at most a few things, at once. As information comes at us from various sources, we have to jump from one item to the next. We cannot absorb it all at once. This fundamental barrier may be overcome with technology in the future, but for the next decade at least it will still be a key obstacle.

We can follow many streams, but only one-item-at-a-time; and this requires rapidly shifting our focus from one article to another and from one stream to another. And there's no great alternative: Cramming all our separate streams into one merged activity stream quickly gets too noisy and overwhelming to use.

The ability to view different streams for different contexts is very important and enables us to filter and focus our attention effectively. As a result, it's unlikely there will be a single activity stream -- we'll have many, many streams. And we'll have to find ways to cope with this reality.

Streams may be unidirectional or bidirectional. Some streams are more like "feeds" that go from content providers to content consumers. Other streams are more like conversations or channels in which anyone can be both a provider and a consumer of content.

As streams become a primary mode of content distribution and communication, they will increasingly be more conversational and less like feeds. And this is important -- because to participate in a feed you can be passive, you don't have to be present synchronously.  But to participate in a conversation you have to be present and synchronous -- you have to be there, while it happens, or you may miss out on it entirely.

A Stream of Challenges and Opportunities

We are going to need new kinds of tools for managing and participating in streams, and we are already seeing the emergence of some of them. For example Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, RSS feed readers, and activity stream tracking tools like Facebook and Friendfeed. There are also new tools for filtering our streams around interests, for example Twine.com (* Disclosure: the author of this article is a principal in Twine.com). Real-time search tools are also emerging to provide quick ways to scan the Stream as a whole. And trend discovery tools are helping us to see what's hot in real-time.

One of the most difficult challenges will be how to know what to pay attention to in the Stream: Information and conversation flow by so quickly that we can barely keep up with the present, let alone the past. How will know what to focus on, what we just have to read, and what to ignore or perhaps read later?

Recently many sites have emerged that attempt to show what is trending up in real-time, for example by measuring how many retweets various URLs are getting in Twitter. But these services only show the huge and most popular trends. What about all the important stuff that's not trending up massively? Will people even notice things that are not widely RT'd or "liked"? Does popularity equal importance of content?

Certainly one measure of the value of an item in the Stream is social popularity. Another measure is how relevant it is to a topic, or even more importantly, to our own personal and unique interests. To really cope with the Stream we will need ways to filter that combine both these different approaches. Furthermore as our context shifts throughout the day (for example from work to various projects or clients to shopping to health to entertainment, to family etc) we need tools that can adapt to filter the Stream differently based on what we now care about.

A Stream oriented Internet also offers new opportunities for monetization. For example, new ad distribution networks could form to enable advertisers to buy impressions in near-real time across URLs that are trending up in the Stream, or within various slices of it. For example, an advertiser could distribute their ad across dozens of pages that are getting heavily retweeted right now. As those pages begin to decline in RT's per minute, the ads might begin to move over to different URLs that are starting to gain.

Ad networks that do a good job of measuring real-time attention trends may be able to capitalize on these trends faster and provide better results to advertisers. For example, an advertiser that is able to detect and immediately jump on the hot new meme of the day, could get their ad in front of the leading influencers they want to reach, almost instantly. And this could translate to sudden gains in awareness and branding.

The emergence of the Stream is an interesting paradigm shift that may turn out to characterize the next evolution of the Web, this coming third-decade of the Web's development. Even though the underlying data model may be increasingly like a graph, or even a semantic graph, the user experience will be increasingly stream oriented.

Whether Twitter, or some other app, the Web is becoming increasingly streamlike. How will we filter this stream? How will we cope? Whoever can solve these problems first and best is probably going to get rich.

Other Articles on This Topic

http://www.techmeme.com/090517/p6#a090517p6

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/15/mining-the-thought-stream/

 

Comments

  • Public Comments

    • Christian Diel Christian Diel
      6 months ago


      Considering upcoming web 3.0 developments around semantic web and personalized services, stream will be the metaphor for the centralized individual which will be crossed by several data and information streams via web and mobile. For the stream metaphor itself this will result in a whole new quality of the term

    • Praveen Yalavarty Praveen Yalavarty
      6 months ago


      A well thought article. Thanks for sharing. The only concern as the web transforms to stream, for that matter has always been, will be privacy and security. And the solution can only from open source community.

    • Bent Rasmussen Bent Rasmussen
      6 months ago


      The underlying technology, microblogs, is surely very simple - not even a technology per se, just a limited subset of blogs. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a big impact, it already is having that and the format limitation was the driver for a new culture of tiny events items - thoughts or otherwise.

      But as you say, how to present and filter it, even summarize it, it so that it can be consumed efficiently is more interesting. And UX will play no small part. If streams are real-time, the Web follow. Much more drive towards tickers inside Web pages, where streams are passing by as if listening to the stock market, but listening to people (and machines) instead.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • . .•∞º˙ . .•∞º˙
      6 months ago


      It's not a stream. It's a small break in the levy that starts out as a trickle, and quickly becomes an onrushing flood that knocks down the barriers and channel walls of communication. We don't need a filter, we need a boat that will raise us up above the floodwaters. Preferably a glass-bottomed boat so we can look through the hull at whatever we float over as it passes by in the raging torrent of information that has been unleashed.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Dan Romescu Dan Romescu
      6 months ago


      We are in the functionality phase of our WWW, first social networks, now real-time streams. At this moment strong social stream hubs like twitter, facebook, social hub aggregator like friendfeed and not to forget semantic hub aggregator like TWINE :-)
      Everything is going to be real time, history is made in seconds...

    • miz minh miz minh
      6 months ago


      Before the Web there was the Net. There was a frontier feel technologically. Socially there was connection & association. Then came the bleak disassociation of Web 1.0. We became recipients again. Participation required skills that the Net had not asked of us. There was a silicon ceiling to hack thru and then and extended period of newbiehood.Web 2.0 came - the readWRITEweb - & looking upon it we saw that it was friendlier.

      And now there is Twitterdom & its ilk - what can it portend ?

      Me? I'd like to have a good chat with Ted Nelson.

    • François Dongier
      6 months ago


      "Does popularity equal importance of content?"
      Certainly not. As you say, the web is becoming a global conversation and tools are making it a lot easier for everyone to intervene in it. Popular items in the stream make more noise but often they are still just noise. The jewels are often hidden in a quiet pond. It's still hard to find them. And then, when you've found some gem, it's not easy to stop looking at the stream and just spend the time needed to read it carefully. The danger being that it will stay in an open tab for a while, or that it will just be added to the "things to read" list. In this sense, I find Twine particularly dangerous: I often feel satisfied after having filed something at the right place, in the right twine(s), "for further reading". But maybe I shouldn't feel satisfied with that...
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      • margolis margolis
        6 months ago


        I agree with all my heart. We're sinking in the stream. And we're going deeper with our own created stream of future that will never be. Twine, along with other bookmarking services, can be a phantasmagoria of knowledge, when actually it's knowledge that will never be attained. We're so busy collecting that we seldom have the space-time to really read. Or think. Or be.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

        • Sam Ragnarsson Sam Ragnarsson
          5 months ago


          Great article, but as touched on in the comments above, what is this all for. We seem to be so hooked on the importance of being connected to it all, the greatest fear being that we might miss something in this 'stream'. I think somewhere in here we should start thinking more what we are gaining, and how we can turn this constant flow of information into something that is more useful to us than just taking up our time.
          Now don't take it the wrong way - I am no better. I feel guilty when I haven't checked up on my facebook for a day, and "to read" folders are growing in several places such as in Google read, Delicious and Twine. However, from time to time - I stop as I get this feeling that a vital ingredient is missing: What am I as an individual gaining? (if it is knowledge, I have a feeling I need to quantify it better) And what is society gaining?
          ..anyway - this is just food for thought. maybe I'll write a proper blog about it next week.
          Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • johnrod johnrod
      6 months ago


      Theme is feasible. Facebook recently published OpenStream API to facilitate social activity flow between apps. Networking protocols use streams to efficiently combine packets from different sources while enroute, e.g. video channels. File systems have used this concept to dedicate data transfer between devices. Also see lifestream. Marketing apps might verify or propose solutions to meet observed needs. Thanks.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • JDP JDP
      6 months ago


      The Stream, or rather "streams" have always been with us. That was the stream of events that made up reality, history, our daily lives, the lives of those around us, and the lives of those more distant. Our attention span and focus could only take in so much of that, often missing even what was of interest or importance in our own vicinity. Time and analysis (of journalists, writers, politicians, historians, etc.) attempted to capture and highlight some of that - often missing the multitudinous details surrounding everyone else but sometimes getting the broader picture "right" - eventually if not initially. This DID mean that more than just the "now" was considered; and often that the more distance past was looked to for enlightening lessons and patterns to be applied to the more recent past and to the "now".

      What is different is the number of streams into which we can now dip our awareness. That began growing long ago too - with the advent of large communities and more travel (more potential for person to person and person to crowd interactions), publishing, radio, and then TV. The internet has merely added another layer, albeit one of immense magnitude and growth beyond the previous ones.

      If these new "streams" are to be more than just quick, surface-level plunges (as many as one can or wants to manage), are to be more than just statistical mines for targeting ads / noticing current attention trends, are (most of them) to last longer than a thunderstorm's rivulets in the desert (of our attention focus and span), then something will have to "step up" to the concentration and value discovery / preservation previously afforded at a more leisurely pace by human analysts (historians, journalists, etc.) -

      o It will have to allow us to span the flows with some focus and "fishing" that is more than in the ephemeral "now" - taking into account and understanding the likely relevant and explicatory events / information in both the "close" and further past.

      o It will have to bring back more than just the snippets that our previous attention-indicating activities might suggest.

      o It will have to be malleably directable based on our current needs / desires (and not just those of our past or of our "crowdspace", which may usually be acceptable but to which we should not always be shackled).

      o It will have to be "intelligent" enough to make sense of what it finds and "learn" to throw away or deprecate that which has less importance to what we want (including ads), since our attention cannot and should not be taxed with so much personal "filtering".

      o It will have to be able to appropriately group its results (since we do have more than one interest and activity; it's just that we can rarely handle more than one at a time); and that grouping is NOT something we should have to do in a largely manual way ourselves (setting up groups or identifying and joining them).

      o It will have to be able (according to our preferences and abilities) to do at least some pre-analysis to make even the compressed "intelligence" it has gathered of easier relevance, priority, and actionability; otherwise, we will merely be presented with thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of stream "droplets" in which we will drown as surely as we would have in attempting to swim all of the streams or in attempting drink from the firehose of millions of droplets current tools offer us (for instance, Google results or RSS feeds based only a few simple terms / categories!).

      o It will have to automatically help connect us with those of like minds and interests, since the streams are sweeping millions of those along already (and promise to sweep more) - making our manual and one-on-one discovery of them just slightly less likely than being able to follow all the streams in which they float.

      o AND, it will have to do all of this while at the same time proving itself trustworthy for each user; and for some it will have to do so (at least initially) under full user control and understanding. When it disappoints us or betrays us (to ads, manipulation, scammers, etc.), it will be our human nature to treat it as we do humans who so transgress - we think less of them, rely on them less, trust them less, even shun them.

      And that's probably not all. I'm sure I have missed or forget some for the "now". But beyond the "now", like any new medium / technology this is still and will be evolving for some time. What is needed today in regard to it will change tomorrow (see the history of TV).
      Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

      • Andrew Waywood
        5 months ago


        Thanks JDP. Paying attention is a good starting point for thinking about what the web will become. The challenge of attention is both philosophical and engineering - that is how to align computing with the requirements of human attending. Attending is the bedrock of knowing. Here are my reflections on these threads.
        1. Knowledge is only information in use.
        2. Useful is only defined within practices - doing is practical, being is theoretical.
        3. Practices give rise to problems as they are executed in the real world. These problems are the foundation of context. The primary context for any information use is always where a purpose meets the world. NB problems to a greater or lesser extents are unique to present situations and purposes. Here is an interface between tacit and explicit knowledge and also the distinction between pragmatic and semantic approaches to meaning.
        4. Collaboration is a negotiation around socially agreed problems. It works through communication channels. (NB Information channel theory provides an implicit definition of "social context")
        5. Points one to four spell out a basis for a process ontology. Most computer science is committed to an entity ontology. In short it is the difference between seeing the future of the web as organizing the "somethings" on the web, and seeing the future of the web as modeling collaborative "somedoings".
        6. Graphs that model the relations between people, content, and purposes (primary contexts) offer a new conception of computing.
        7. New algorithms and data structures are required before the web becomes what I think we should be after, namely a thought amplifier. (Very very important for the future of innovation as specialization means information connections become more tenuous as they are siloed into expertise. )
        8. The "It will..." list that JDP gives hits the mark, except it won't be an it that provides the benefits rather there will be a computing practice from which the benefits arise. I believe advances in graph theory make this achievable. The processing power is there (just about) but we are still short of understanding the problem well enough to produce the configurations at relevant system levels.
        9 Dreams for the future are most useful when we can see an engineering path to the end point. I and some colleagues have been working on a new graph algebra for knowledge objects. The algorithms scale, and the new formal (ie computable) definition of context that we give (which we call effective context) enables bottom up ontologies (ie DAGs) to be calculated from aggregations or nets of information.
        10 I think Western "entity thinking" and much of AI is at a dead end. I hope the future web will be about engineering new ways of doing for social purposes.
        Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

      • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
        5 months ago


        Nice ideas in your post JDP thanks
        Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

    • mariana soffer mariana soffer
      5 months ago


      Using streams make sense for humans. The textual information we read and the one we listen to are both processed as streams and sen't to be processed by the brain via the auditory loop.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine, Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Pierre Lévy Pierre Lévy
      5 months ago


      OK! Now the question is: what is a global semantically networked hypermedia memory fed by streams?
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • seh
      5 months ago


      stream = sequence of network (aka graph) "deltas" that consist of link additions / removals

    • Emile Silvis Emile Silvis
      5 months ago


      Great metaphor!
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
      5 months ago


      I just edited this article again, and adjusted a few dates and some wording.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      • Pierre Lévy Pierre Lévy
        5 months ago


        1) Internet = collective nervous system: OK
        2) Web = collective brain: hmmm... the Web is an important part of the infrastructure of the global memory (collective brain is exagerated. It's only one of the first layers of it. Cyberspace is still in embryonic form)
        3) Stream = global mind: definitely not. I understand the relation between the linearity or sequentiality of the digital stream and the linearity of the personal thought stream. But there is no "mind" without reflexivity or consciousness, and you know that. The "stream" has no reflexivity, it is not a mind, it is just the flow that will feed the future mind.
        By the way, global reflexive collective intelligence needs full transparency. No global brain or global mind will be based on commercial secrets.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

        • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
          5 months ago


          The reflexivity is already there -- in the people themselves -- who form a critical part of the Stream. The Stream is a cybernetic loop that includes people. Therefore it is effectively reflexively aware. Reflexive awareness will not come from software or machines or some kind of information, and it won't come from magical complexity either -- it's already present, in us.

          The global mind is a cognitive process, just like the human mind. The witness of the human mind is not "in" the mind, just as the witnesses of the collective mind (humans) are not "in" the Stream.
          Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

          • Pierre Lévy Pierre Lévy
            5 months ago


            I agree with everything you just said, there is a misunderstanding here: I mean that there is still no "mirror" (or dynamic synthetic representation, if you want) of the global mind as such. Yes, as you say, the reflexivity will always be in the people, but the question is what is reflected? Any particular stream a is a very partial and tiny aspect of the global mind.
            Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

            • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
              5 months ago


              I think about this question often too. We have several mini-mirrors already. For example, sites that reflect current trends -- like Google Zeitgeist, or Technorati, or trending topics on Twitter, or services like Twitturl, Psyng, and others that map trends in real time. But those are partial views. Psyng is perhaps one of the most comprehensive, but still just a tiny slice. What would the comprehensive central mirror look like and do? Is it even possible or useful? Also -- mirroring back to a user their own stream is possible, but no so useful perhaps -- it seems that it would be more useful to see mirrors of others, or of large groups -- views which might not be possible to know or see any other way...
              Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

              • Tony Sutherland Tony Sutherland
                5 months ago


                I do think that mirroring back to the user (to oneself) is useful - provided that what is being mirrored back is the reflection of what one considered or planned to be the future (at a point in time) and that the mirroring happens in the "now", when the planned future may or may not be about to bring itself into existence (to "become", not just to "be").
                Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • roland legrand roland legrand
      5 months ago


      Wondering how virtual worlds such as Second Life fit into this. As it is explained in the article, the web is not the internet, it developed on top of it. The Stream is developing on top of the Web, or.. on top of the Internet? (which would include parts of the internet which are not part of the web as such, like Second Life and other virtual environments).
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • tunde cockshott tunde cockshott
      5 months ago


      I love the concept of a stream, but the focus on the now does not negate the importance of historical data. With the increase in the speed and quantity of the flow the need to be able to go downstream and find items from the past becomes even more important. While it is attractive to see the now as the most important element we woul dnot be able to stand on the shoulders of giants if we could not effectively draw from previous knowledge. Twitter and all micro bloging/IM etc approaches provide short snippets and as such some can be digested quickly but the meatier deeper items of content take time to both create and understand. There will always be a place for these measured items, the problem is how to do effective post filtering to focus on a manageable subset of content.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Willi Schroll Willi Schroll
      5 months ago


      Subjective experience is that of a stream.
      As a knowledge worker with tools like feed readers, realtime tweet deck I experience it as a flood with very limited control on my side.
      The metaphor of surfing has a surprising comeback then!

      But it is a social thing, more like rafting in a river,
      or a ralley with a lot of people – you see millions, yes billions on the horizon.
      Micro authors, micro artists, micro powered people ...
      Some in the near space.
      Some quickly vanishing (weak ties) and coming back from time to time in your field of perception.
      You hear their shouts and gestures
      (some are gone crazy, tweeting like birds all day long).

      You realize:
      This river has no bank, no shore.
      It is the ocean, wide open, infinite.
      You can just close your eyes and it is gone.
      Gaze at it and you are drawn back into that swirl and twirl – the stream of dreams.

    • jeremiah abrams jeremiah abrams
      5 months ago


      Beautiful clear and crisp... thank you!

    • Rune Stilling
      5 months ago


      Hi Novak - That was a very inspiring post. Interesting replies above especially by margolis and JDP.

      Am I correct in assuming that much of your cosmology is inspired by buddhism (and thus hinduism)? If so I can follow you along the way.

      To see the ever changing content of the web as a metaphor for what is going on in a sort of collective mind is interesting. Humankind must at all times have had a collective mind. The difference comparing then and now is that today "thoughts" are moving, changing and developing much faster than before. So what does it mean, that we as individuals are able to tap into and participate in the collective mind on a much larger and more efficient scale today?

      What strikes me about your article is that it seems we are more or less passive and helpless consumers of information and for no apparant reason. Why not turn things upside down by looking even more into the buddhist/hinduist understanding of human existence? Seen from this perspective we are all creators of our own individual reality. With our minds (intellect, will power, senses, ego) we choose the reality we want to live. Thus we choose the streams that fit our desires, needs and wants in life. It's not a question of being able to consume an ever increasing amount of stream chatter. It's a question about being able to create and recreate reality together with other individual minds that are benificial to all humans.

      How does this reality construction work with streams and the collective mind? It works by the exchange of ideas and emotions. The more focus an idea or emotion gets the more real it becomes. This is how Obama got elected. Obama as president of the United States was just an idea and an emotion in the beginning that got more and more focus and attention till it finally became reality. You could claim the same thing about the idea of the semantic web.

      So the streams (the thoughs and emotions of the collective mind) are all competing for attention. The individual mind will never be able to process it all. But if you want to know where the focus is and which ideas are being developed within a specific interest of yours you have to do some data mining. Also if you want to participate in the creation of a specific reality you have to connect to other people and think together with them. Then if you idea resonates broadly you might get the opportunity to create something new ie. make an idea or emotion manifest in the world.

      When an idea becomes dominant more and more people will have the need to and want to connect to the idea and make use of it. This is where business enters the equation. If you have more experience with the inner workings of an idea or you with the use of specific knowledge and tools can make that idea more accesible to others you might have a business going.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • François Dongier
      5 months ago


      How far can we go with metaphors?
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • mariana soffer mariana soffer
      5 months ago


      Sorry stil not get it How will you define streams?Explain stream metaphore, is it different from analogy? do you follow pinkers idea about them?
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • François Dongier
      5 months ago


      Meme is building: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
      5 months ago


      I've updated this article with a more precise definition of what "a stream" is.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • jebworks jebworks
      5 months ago


      This is an excellent article on where the web is headed and how we will interact with it in future. The impact will be felt in travel there is no doubt about that.
      Travel & Tourism Marketing on the Smart Web

    • Rob Bryanton Rob Bryanton
      5 months ago


      A very useful article, Nova, my compliments. I've linked to it from my newest blog entry, adding some spins and connections of my own to your idea: http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/05/stream.html
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Eric Rumsey
      5 months ago


      Salman Rushdie saw “The Stream” coming, in 1990 — The Stream of Stories that he envisions is “made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” Sounds like he’s talking about the story we’ll all living every day on the Web (Stream?).

      For more on Rushdie’s vision -- connecting it to this article by Nova Spivack, and another recent article by Peter Brantley -- see my article: The Web as a Stream of Stories
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • Maureen Maureen
      5 months ago


      Memory and history. How might the stream keep alive the past? If the global mind is only the present, is this like a brain injured person who only 'knows' the current time -- an amnesiac global mind? If the stream is all there is... and let's assume that this is true for the global mind AND the human mind -- might we need to have lots and lots of automated 'bubble-uppers' to keep memory alive in the streams? If I care about keeping say, William Butler Yeats, an active memory in the stream might I become a curator of automated streaming for him? Possible snippets of wikipedia or Dbpedia or Powerset info pumped into the central nervous system pipelines of twitter, facebook, twine. How does history stay alive in the streaming mind? What does this say about how human memory works? Does the stream need bedrock? [very provocative piece. thanks]
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • John Roberts John Roberts
      5 months ago


      I think there's an important nuance re/"...to participate in a conversation you have to be present and synchronous...". With the stream you don't have to be perfectly synchronous, as in a telephone conversation. It just has to be 'good enough'. For example, with Twitter, there can be seconds, minutes, hours, etc. between the time somebody tweets and the time you read and possibly respond. Granted, with fast moving topics, it might be just a minute or so, but that time is critical. It allows people to actually do other things in the meantime.
      Technology and Social Change

    • Rune Stilling
      5 months ago


      Seems Google has created their own stream concept: The wave.
      Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

    • George Webb George Webb
      4 months ago


      I like Willi Schroll's analogy of the ocean. We must all learn how to sail or be capsized! And we will relish solid land at times.. (Being completely disconnected from time to time).
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