Kevin Marks’ Flow Past Web = The Web Of Flow

In a recent post, Kevin Marks suggest that the ‘Real Time Web’ might be the wrong metaphor for what is happening, building on a comment by Rob Hof:

[from Epeus’ epigone: The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing]

The ‘RealTime Web’ may be a name we are stuck with, but it is still a misleading one. Real-time software is a well-defined field where computing has to complete or fail cleanly by a deadline, because latency is paramount. A two-way phone conversation is an example - if the delay between parties exceeds a few hundred milliseconds, normal conversation becomes impossible, and people have to formally take turns. This is because a true verbal conversation is a flow state, where you are both engaged and responding.

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As Robert Hof says:

“Real-time” is actually a bit of a misnomer. Most of this activity doesn’t truly occur in real time, the way talking on the phone does, and social gestures such as sharing links with friends are just as important a part of the appeal as immediacy.

Instead, we should think about a web that flows past, a web where the flow is important, as well as its past. The Flow Past web.

It is impossible for me to be upset with Kevin, but this last sentence, in particular, is the Web of Flow that I have been preaching for years (see Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic, Action Flows And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution, The Future OS: The Web of Flow, Web 2.0 Is Over, Time For A Web Of Flow, and many others), and he doesn’t mention it. Hmmm. I need to shout louder, obviously, to be heard over the noise in this space.

The Web Of Flow represents a revolution: a movement away from the ‘Web Of Pages’ metaphor and architecture that has structured the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras. We will move away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, searching for information and following links like trails through the forest. Instead, information will find its way to us, mediated, filtered, and contextualized by social relationships implemented by streaming social tools.

As I wrote in 2007:

The final completion of the social revolution will be, not surprisingly, wiring the sociality that connects us together into the architecture of the platform we will be standing on.

We will see increasingly sophisticated widgetry being created, leading us one step at a time up and away from the page/ publishing model toward a new world of socially constrained streams. It will take years, but new standards will emerge, either de facto or de jure, that will allow us to control access to information flowing through a sprawling web of flow based on social controls. Whatever form this takes will certainly require the controls — to some extent — being pushed into the information that is flowing. The updates, photos, notes, recommendations, and videos that we will share through these streams will have to be locked (encrypted) so that only those to whom we have given the keys can open them.

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Ultimately the ability to create a published page at a specific URL on the web will be something like the ability to dump the bits stored at a specific location on my hard drive: occasionally useful, but not the way that we generally interact with the information there.

I believe this is as profound a change as the movement from text to windows-based UI, or the movement from disconnected computing to the Web.

The final completion of the social revolution will be, not surprisingly, wiring the sociality that connects us together into the architecture of the platform we will be standing on.

So say “Web of Flow” a few times. Get used to it. Tell all your friends. It may wind up being called the Real Time Web, but you’ll know what is really going on if someone asks you. Or, more importantly, if you are conceptualizing the future shape of an application intended to play in this emerging brave new world.