The Real-Time Internet and The Need for Speed

Carpe Diem

At work or at play, the present trumps the past. Many companies praise their employees for past achievements, but they will let those same employees go if the present performance does not equal those achievements. Any currently competing Olympic athelete will relish past victories, but, when if you asked her what event is the most important, she will tell you it's the current race or game.

The future has the same kind of weight. That's how the saying, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," became so popular.

The present tense, "now", is when opportunities are won or lost, gained or wasted. "Now" is when a customer or friend asks for help and needs it. Communication is often a key to the ability to understand and quickly respond to what is happening now, and the pace for communication keeps building.

A Brief History of Communication

As Peter Saint-Andre noted in his technology blog:

In 1800, it took 2 years to send a message from London to Calcutta. You wrote a physical letter and entrusted it to a wind-powered ship that sailed down the western coasts of Europe and Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, back up the eastern coast of Africa, across the Arabian Sea, etc. -- with, presumably, stops in just about every port (yes, they had multi-hop message transports back then).

By 1914, it took 1 month to send a message from London to Calcutta. The Suez Canal had opened, and steamships powered their way through the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thence to India. Big improvement.

With the advent of reliable airmail (1950s or 1960s?), the time was probably reduced to 1 week.

Overnight mail, which became popular and relatively affordable in the 1980s, cut that down to two days. (Remember those early FedEx commercials? "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight!")

When the Internet was opened to commercial use, electronic mail became the killer app (1994 or so), and people grew accustomed to delivery times on the order of 10 minutes (depending on the number of hops, how frequently you polled your mail server, and so on).

Then along came instant messaging. Now your message gets from London to Calcutta in something like 100 milliseconds (and almost always less than a second). Plus you've got presence information, too!

Does this mean faster is better? No. But when was the last time you sat down to write a physical letter and sent it via surface mail? Sure, you might do that once in a long while, but it's rare enough that you remember each occasion.

The lesson I draw is that people feel the need for speed. All other things being equal, people will prefer the fastest means of communication available. That doesn't bode well for the email network. But, as Doc Searls recently noted, email is a slum.

Until recently, something happening now could only take place in person or over the telephone, but "now" routinely occurs on the Internet with instant messaging (IM), whether it be in financial markets (BOT 500 AMD 12.64), or trash talking between friends as they play an game online, or the current status of a fleet of taxis displayed on a map.

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