The Live Web

I’ve been thinking lately about what enamors me the most about Twitter.  I get the “why Twitter”, “I don’t have time for Twitter”, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter if it bit me on the eyebrow” type of comments all the time.  And I’ve struggled with explaining Twitter, enough that I recently wrote a post suggesting that instead of telling people what Twitter is, they have to experience it for themselves to “get it”.  But in the past few weeks I think I’ve really started to understand what is so incredibly powerful about technology like Twitter.

We hear a lot about Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and my still personal favorite “Web Candle + a Monkey”, as told by everybody’s favorite ninja.

Personally I think its a bit silly to try to name a particular point in time when talking about the Internet, but alas, I’m just a player in this game, so I roll with it.

But there has been an incredibly significant change in the web with the introduction of Twitter.  We’re now seeing a Live Web, one that we never had seen before. You can search twitter and get real time results on any topic at any time.  Try it.

However, the best example of this Live Web was probably during the inauguration when CNN and Facebook teamed up to allow people to watch the inauguration and at the same time see what people across the world were saying about it.

And we’ve all read by now about how Twitter broke the news on the US Airways flight 1549 crash.  Give it a shot, during one of your favorite TV shows (if you watch it live, that’s I guess an interesting tanget – the web is getting more real time while TV is becoming far less real time), pull up Twitter and search for that show and watch all the comments that people are tweeting.

After writing this post I found a really good article by Erick Schonfeld (follow him asap!) at TechCrunch that hints at this Live Web concept and Twitter’s influence.