{"id":182,"date":"2009-09-08T11:35:42","date_gmt":"2009-09-08T18:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/35.225.155.113\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/09\/08\/is_information_at_the_speed_of_light_better\/"},"modified":"2019-10-13T13:13:25","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T20:13:25","slug":"is-information-at-the-speed-of-light-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/09\/is-information-at-the-speed-of-light-better.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Information at the Speed of Light Better?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I started
\nfollowing Dave Winer<\/a> on Twitter and the discussion about the
\nrelevancy of RSS and RSS updates in “real-time” has lead me to
\nask a simply question that I have yet to see asked: Is all this
\n“real-time” communication even necessary?<\/p>\n

\n

What are you talking about, I hear some
\nof you asking? Ok, here’s the deal, Dave Winer is one of the
\ndevelopers of RSS. RSS is a file format that allows for the
\ndissemination of web content, usually blogs, to be discoverable and
\nreadable by others online. That is not everyone goes to my website<\/a>,
\non a daily basis to see if I’ve posted a new article. Many people use
\nan aggregator<\/a> that “subscribes” to a “news feed” provided on
\nmy site<\/a>. When a new article posts, it appears in their aggregator at
\nwhich point it can be read. All of this depends on RSS.<\/p>\n

\n

Supposedly, however, RSS is dead. Or at
\nleast RSS is dying. Why? Well because it takes time for the
\npropagation of new posts to appear in one’s aggregator\/reader. Of
\ncourse time is relative and one has to reconcile the
\nillusion of faster<\/a> with the actuality of faster, but for some it seems RSS takes too much
\ntime compared to status updates. Why should my readers wait for their
\naggregator when I can tell them right away on Twitter or Facebook?<\/p>\n

\n

But wait, RSS isn’t dying, rssCloud<\/a>
\nwill save it by speeding up the notification process for RSS feeds<\/p>\n

\n

But, wait. Wait, I ask. Why do we need
\nreally fast (or the appearance thereof) in the first place? I’m mean
\nthink about it, phone calls, emails, status updates, news feeds. All
\nof this is running really fast, probably as close to instantaneous as
\nwe many ever be able to get.<\/p>\n

\n

And what do we all end up doing? We all
\nend up developing with personal tricks and time management decisions about how
\nto best process all this information. We allot Monday mornings to
\ncatching up on Facebook. We flag emails for levels of priority and we
\nfilter phone calls based on caller id.<\/p>\n

\n

Why? Well because my time, schedule and
\nlevel of interest is different from yours. That doesn’t mean I’m
\nignoring you, it just means, well, I’ve got something else on my
\nmind….<\/p>\n

\n

Which brings me back to my initial
\nquestion for us developers and users: Do all of these different
\ntypes of communication have to be in real-time? Is it necessary?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I started following Dave Winer on Twitter and the discussion about the relevancy of RSS and RSS updates in “real-time” has lead me to ask a simply question that I have yet to see asked: Is all this “real-time” communication even necessary? What are you talking about, I hear some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,82],"tags":[211,93,43,106,210,75,146,171],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weinstein.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}